Blaze News original: Obama, Biden set stage for Trump's derailing of Harvard's gravy train



The Trump administration has explicitly threatened, and in some cases suspended, the funding of universities across the country, citing violations of federal law and policy.

Amid this governmental campaign to fight anti-Semitism on campus, keep men out of women's sports, maximize viewpoint diversity, eliminate discriminatory DEI practices, and kick divisive critical race theory programming to the curb, Harvard University has emerged as the administration's white whale.

Democrats and other leftists have, through their overreactions to the administration's handling of Harvard, given away their own suspicions that the 389-year-old institution's neutralization as a political entity and restoration to former glory would mark a turning point — perhaps not an end to the left's long march through the institutions but certainly a landmark arrest of the American campus slide into lawlessness, lunacy, and identitarianism.

This concern appears to ground Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer's (N.Y.) statement, "The Trump administration is making unprecedented demands of universities aimed at undermining or even destroying these vital institutions."

'Tactics like these likely will have massive long-term consequences.'

"Universities must do more to fight antisemitism on campus, but the administration should not use it as an excuse for a broad and extra-legal attack on these institutions," continued Schumer. "Harvard is right to resist."

The concern similarly lurks in the background of Vox senior politics correspondent Andrew Prokop's assertion that "the assault on Harvard is part of a broader Trumpian assault on elite universities, which is itself part of a yet broader federal assault on progressive institutions and groups deemed enemies of the president."

Prokop added, "Tactics like these likely will have massive long-term consequences, forever transforming the relationship between the federal government and academia."

Despite the alarmist rhetoric peddled by activists and Democratic lawmakers, the Trump administration's insistence that institutional beneficiaries of federal funding hold up their ends of the bargain — especially in the case of Harvard University — appears to be neither unlawful nor unprecedented.

While the Trump administration is less ambiguous in its language and more confrontational with its actions — which have in a number of cases already borne fruit — it is simply exercising muscles previously flexed by previous governments to ensure federally funded universities comply with federal civil rights law and public policy.

Now

The Trump administration has threatened, frozen, and/or temporarily suspended federal funding to a number of schools in recent months. For example, the administration:

  • temporarily paused U.S. Department of Agriculture funding to the University of Maine System while ensuring its seven universities and law school were in compliance with Title IX and Title VI, which ban sex and race-based discrimination;
  • brought Columbia University to heel by announcing the end of $400 million worth of grants and contracts after the institution failed to protect Jewish students from anti-Semitic attacks;
  • froze over $1 billion in federal funding for Cornell University and around $790 million for Northwestern University amid investigations of anti-Semitism and racial discrimination;
  • threatened to freeze $510 million of Brown University's federal funding amid investigations into the institution's DEI initiatives and alleged anti-Semitism;
  • paused around $210 million in research grants to Princeton University pending an investigation — reportedly opened by the Biden Department of Education in 2024 — into anti-Semitism on campus; and
  • suspended approximately $175 million in grants and contracts to the University of Pennsylvania over its policies enabling men to compete in women's sports.

While the Trump administration has taken a similar approach to Harvard, the country's oldest university has proven a tougher nut to crack.

Blaze News previously reported that the administration notified Harvard University President Alan Garber and Penny Pritzker, senior fellow of the Harvard Corporation, on April 11 that billions of dollars in federal funds were at stake unless the institution agreed to implement a number of "critical reforms."

'Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions.'

The government specifically asked for Harvard's cooperation in implementing these reforms:

  • foster "clear lines of authority and accountability," empower tenured professors who are devoted to the scholarly mission of the university, reduce the power held by students and untenured faculty, and reduce forms of governance bloat;
  • adopt merit-based hiring and admissions policies and cease all discriminatory admissions, hiring, promotion, and compensation practices;
  • "reform its recruitment, screening, and admissions of international students to prevent admitting students hostile to the American values and institutions inscribed in the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including students supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism";
  • commission an external party to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity;
  • reform programs with "egregious records of anti-Semitism or other bias";
  • eliminate DEI-based policies; and
  • clamp down on student disruptions and misconduct.

The university, which has an endowment of $53.2 billion, initially responded by suggesting the necessary reforms were already underway and that the Trump administration's demands were unlawful.

Barack Obama, a Democrat whose administration threatened its fair share of universities' federal funding, was among the liberals who celebrated Harvard's defiance, writing, "Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions — rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect."

'That stops under the Trump Administration.'

Evidently not interested in playing Obama-supported games, the Trump administration provided the Massachusetts university with a steady stream of bad news.

For starters,

  • the administration reportedly launched a review of around $9 billion in grants and contracts with the university over possible violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act;
  • the Education Department's Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced a $2.2 billion freeze in multi-year grants and a $60 million freeze in multi-year contract value to Harvard;
  • the National Institutes of Health reportedlytold grant managers to halt disbursements to Harvard;
  • the Department of Homeland security announced the cancellation of two six-figure grants and indicated the university's ability to enroll foreign students was in jeopardy; and
  • the administration appeared poised at the time of writing to pull $1 billion of Harvard's funding for health research.

Julie Hartman, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education, told Blaze News in a statement, "The Department has given Columbia and Harvard every opportunity to come into compliance with federal anti-discrimination laws."

"On March 10, OCR sent letters to both universities reminding them of their obligations under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act to protect Jewish students on campus," continued Hartman. "ED has also attempted multiple times to engage in negotiations with both of these universities, and the Department hopes to continue negotiating with them to protect students' civil rights."

"In the past, educational entities were allowed to violate Title VI with little to no enforcement action from the federal government," added the ED spokeswoman. "That stops under the Trump Administration. We will not allow taxpayer funds to sponsor discrimination against American students."

After the administration began derailing the school's gravy train, Harvard doubled down on its defiance.

When announcing the university's lawsuit against the administration on April 21, Harvard President Alan Garber suggested that the pause on injections of taxpayer dollars into his wealthy institution were "unlawful and beyond the government's authority."

"These actions have stark real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world," wrote Garber.

Garber is hardly the first in recent weeks to suggest the Trump administration's handling of Harvard's defiance was somehow unlawful, harmful, or unprecedented.

Andrew Tyrie, senior fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School, previously told the Harvard Gazette, "This is weakening the United States and imperiling the prosperity and the security of millions of Americans."

'This is the first time an administration has tried something like this.'

Joshua Cherniss, an associate political theory professor at Georgetown University, said, "I study, to some extent, authoritarian regimes, and I think that some of what we're seeing — while it's not equivalent to fully formed authoritarianism — is starting to approach it in terms of trying to have the government dictate the ideas that are taught, that can be expressed and that can't be expressed."

While there has been much of this pearl-clutching about threats to Harvard's gravy train, there has also been shirt-rending over the Trump administration's threat to Harvard's tax-exempt status.

Trump recently wrote, "Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting 'Sickness?' Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!"

"To my knowledge, this is the first time an administration has tried something like this," said R. William Snyder, a professor at the business college of George Mason University, told CNN. "The whole purpose of higher education is to educate the masses. Just because they educate in a way that you don't like, is that grounds to terminate their tax-exempt status? I'd say no."

Contrary to these critics' suggestions, this was not, however, the first time an administration threatened tax-exempt status or funding.

Then

Like Synder, many critics of the president's proposal to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status appeared to strategically develop long-term memory loss.

Manhattan Institute fellow Christopher Rufo and Georgetown law professor Randy Barnett were, however, happy to remind such critics that should Harvard lose its tax-exempt status over alleged noncompliance with federal law or policy, it wouldn't be the first.

Bob Jones University, a private university in Greenville, South Carolina, had racist policies on its books in the mid-20th century — including prohibitions on interracial dating and marriage. Determining that the school's discriminatory policies did not serve a public purpose and were contrary to established public policy, the IRS revoked the school's tax-exempt status in 1975. This decision prompted a heated legal battle.

Ultimately, in Bob Jones University v. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in 1983 that the IRS had authority to deny status to Bob Jones University, Goldsboro Christian School, and other institutions with racist policies.

Powerline recently noted that Harvard, like BJU, has already been found by the Supreme Court to engage in illegal race discrimination — meaning the path to status revocation might be an altogether simpler matter, assuming an activist judge isn't ready to throw more caltrops before the administration.

Just as revoking a misaligned university's tax-exempt status would be nothing new, the Trump administration's threats to universities' federal funding are similarly business as usual.

While the Trump administration has followed through by suspending or freezing funding to a number of universities for their alleged noncompliance with federal law and policy, the Biden administration appeared keen to do something similar — efforts that in a number of cases resulted in agreements and resolutions.

In the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel, the Biden Education Department's Office for Civil Rights opened hundreds of investigations into complaints about anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While such investigations are customarily backed by the implicit threat of suspending noncompliant schools' federal funding, NPR noted that Biden officials expressly threatened to cut funding to schools that failed to take aggressive remedial action.

The Education Department noted in its 2024 fiscal year annual report that the University of Illinois, Drexel University, and Brown University remedied compliance concerns identified by the OCR, thereby preserving their funding.

While concerns were expressed about the possibility that these investigations could chill free speech on campus, critics were not up in arms as they are now.

There also does not appear to have been leftist apoplexy when years earlier, the first Trump administration's Education Department OCR took the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to task after concluding on the basis of nearly 400 reports of sexual harassment and sexual violence that the institution was out of compliance with Title IX. The government ultimately secured a resolution agreement with the school in place of fines or denial of funding.

The Obama administration similarly threatened federal funding for schools that fell out of line with federal law and policy without the same volume of uproar seen today.

For instance, the Obama Education Department's OCR came after Tufts University for Title IX violations, specifically with regard to its handling of sexual harassment and misconduct complaints. It also notified schools that noncompliance with Title IX could result in the OCR initiating "proceedings to withdraw Federal funding by the Department or refer the case to the U.S. Department of Justice for litigation."

In 2016, the Obama administration circulated guidance stating that so-called gender identity was protected under Title IX.

Politico noted at the time that the advisory included "a threat that the Obama administration has leveled against North Carolina in the standoff over the state's law blocking legal protections for gay and transgender individuals: If a state fails to comply with the administration's interpretation of the law, it runs the risk of being sued by the federal government and losing federal funding, particularly for education."

In April 2011, the Obama ED OCR established mandates requiring universities to reduce students' due process rights. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression indicated that failure on the part of universities to heed the regulations, which were announced in a letter from then-Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Russlynn Ali, faced federal investigation and a potential loss of federal funding.

Obama also proposed shifting federal funding away from universities perceived as failing to keep net tuition down.

The previous two Democratic administrations appear to have liberally threatened schools' funding without the accompaniment of a chorus of doomsdayers warning of the coming peril and civilizational harms. Their threats also paved the way for those issued in recent weeks by the Trump administration.

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Blaze News investigates: Sparing taxpayers from funding leftist propaganda



National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service are kept afloat with the help of taxpayer dollars. NPR has gone so far as to claim that "federal funding is essential to public radio's service to the American public and its continuation is critical for both stations and program producers, including NPR."

The media outfits' unmistakable ideological bias and imbalanced coverage in recent decades have prompted a steady stream of calls to defund both organizations or perhaps even to close the fountainhead of most of their taxpayer funding, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — a move that would require lawmakers to revisit the Communications Act of 1934 and its amendments.

Following the re-election of President Donald Trump, who has characterized NPR as a scam and whose first administration sought to cut funding for the CPB, there has been mounting pressure both to ascertain whether NPR, PBS, and their respective member stations have violated federal bylaws and to spare American taxpayers from having to bankroll leftist propaganda.

Blaze News reviewed the media outfits' recent history of partisan hackery and reached out to a top critic of public broadcasting as well as to lawmakers involved in holding the taxpayer-funded media outfits accountable. It appears that to ensure no partisan media outfit is subsidized at taxpayers' expense, the government may have to get out of the business of public broadcasting altogether.

Funding

NPR, a beneficiary of National Endowment for the Arts grants, claims that less than 1% of its annual operating budget comes in the form of grants directly from the CPB — which has an operating budget of $545 million for fiscal year 2025 — and other federal sources.

The outfit, which operates as a syndicator to a network of well over 1,000 public radio stations, has acknowledged, however, that multitudes of public radio stations that receive grants directly from the CPB use the funds to "pay NPR and other public radio producers for their programming."

According to consolidated financial statements, the organization secured over $96.1 million in "core and other programming fees" in 2023, $93.2 million in 2022, $90.4 million in in 2021, and $92.5 million in 2020.

"These station programming fees are one of NPR's primary sources of revenue," noted the media outfit. "The loss of federal funding would undermine the stations' ability to pay NPR for programming, thereby weakening the institution."

Like NPR, public TV stations that receive CPB funding pay significant programming dues to PBS.

According to the public TV broadcaster, its flagship "News Hour" program, for instance, receives roughly 35% of its "annual funding/budget from CPB and PBS via national programming funds — a combination of CPB appropriation funds and annual programming dues paid to PBS by stations re-allocated to programs like ours."

A spokesman for PBS, which has over 330 member television stations, recently indicated that the organization receives 16% of its funding directly from the federal government each year.

Propaganda

While neither NPR nor PBS has done a good job hiding its political leanings, Uri Berliner, a Peabody Award-winning senior business editor who worked at NPR for 25 years, helped shine a spotlight last year on just how slanted public broadcasting has become, slamming NPR specifically in an opinion piece for mindlessly advancing Democratic propaganda and altogether giving up on journalistic independence.

Berliner, the son of an LGBT activist and a grandson of Holocaust victims, made clear at the outset he was no rightist, characterizing himself instead as something akin to the stereotypical NPR listener, "an EV-driving, Wordle-playing, tote bag-carrying coastal elite."

While acknowledging the media outfit’s long-standing "liberal bent," Berliner noted that NPR had effectively transformed into a Democratic propaganda machine, working vigorously to "damage or topple Trump's presidency," in part by "hitch[ing] our wagon to Trump's most visible antagonist, Representative Adam Schiff," and amplifying the Russia collusion hoax.

Berliner — who discovered that 87% of NPR’s Washington, D.C., editors and reporters were registered Democrats and that none were registered as Republicans — hammered NPR further for gaslighting Americans about the likely origins of COVID-19, for turning a blind eye to the Hunter Biden laptop scandal and its characterization of the damning story as a "pure distraction," and over its obsession with race.

While NPR's objectivity had been criticized for decades, Berliner suggested that "independent journalism" at the company really began to slip under former CEO John Lansing, who apparently used George Floyd's death as an excuse to center race and identity in everything the company did while eliminating any remaining "viewpoint diversity."

Berliner indicated that things worsened under the current CEO, Katherine Maher, a longtime BLM supporter who previously helped transform Wikipedia into a repository of leftist propaganda, publicly stated, "Donald Trump is a racist," and suggested that "our reverence for the truth might be a distraction that is getting in the way of finding common ground and getting things done."

After Maher said that Berliner had been "profoundly disrespectful, hurtful, and demeaning" for daring to question the neutrality and integrity of taxpayer-funded propagandists, NPR suspended him. The journalist resigned shortly thereafter.

PBS may not have a Berliner-caliber whistleblower to call its own, but it is certainly no better.

The Media Research Center conducted a study from June 1, 2023, to Nov. 30, 2024, analyzing political labels used by anchors, reporters, and contributors on PBS' "News Hour." PBS staff apparently threw around the term "far right" or some variation thereof 162 times but used the term "far left" only six times.

Reporters reflexively deemed social conservatives and Trump-adjacent Republicans as "extreme" or "extremists."

'I understand the importance of nonpartisan, balanced media coverage.'

While numerous reporters and guests liberally applied the "fascist" label to Trump or his polices, PBS reportedly clamped down on characterizations of failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris and other Democrats as Marxists or communists, writing them off as "slurs."

In another study published last year, the MRC tallied every comment made by PBS journalists during the Republican and Democratic national conventions. Of the 191 minutes of PBS commentary on the Republican National Convention, 72% of opinionated comments were reportedly negative and only 28% were positive.

For instance, when it came to the RNC, "News Hour" co-anchor Amna Nawaz exhibited no pretense of neutrality, accusing Republicans of "echoing some white supremacist notions" and veering "into outright racism."

The DNC coverage was a different story altogether. Not only did PBS air more speeches and footage from the Democratic convention than for the Republican convention, the co-anchors salivated over the speakers.

Geoff Bennett said that the "elevation and evolution" of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) was "so striking because she has found a way to blend populism and pragmatism and blend protest and power."

Not to be outdone by her co-anchor's fawning over AOC, Nawaz stated, "We know we're hearing a lot of this messaging around the joyful warriors that are Harris and Walz, which is really a stark contrast to what we saw on the Republican side."

Defunding

There have been numerous efforts in recent years to defund NPR, defund PBS, and/or shutter the CPB.

Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas), for instance, took aim at both NPR and PBS with a bill in March 2023 titled the No Partisan Radio and Partisan Broadcasting Services Act. By the following year, the bill had 13 co-sponsors but did not go the distance.

Jackson noted that whereas at the time of the media outfits' initial receipt of federal funds, the understanding was that their content "would remain unbiased and benefit every American," it has become "obvious that NPR and PBS have abandoned their founding principles."

Following Berliner's suspension, Republican lawmakers narrowed their focus and pushed multiple bills aimed specifically at kneecapping NPR.

Rep. Claudia Tenney (R-N.Y.), for instance, introduced the Defund NPR Act of 2024, a piece of legislation co-sponsored by 16 other Republicans that would have prohibited federal funding to NPR or to any successor organization.

"As a former newspaper owner and publisher, I understand the importance of nonpartisan, balanced media coverage and have seen firsthand the left-wing bias in our news media," Tenney said at the time. "NPR is using American taxpayer dollars to manipulate the news and lie to the American people on behalf of a political agenda."

Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), a member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, tried something different in December, introducing the No Propaganda Act, which would amend the Communications Act of 1934 to prohibit federal funding for the CPB. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) introduced a corresponding bill in the House.

Kennedy cast doubt on whether the over $15 billion already blown by Congress on the CPB has actually gone toward satisfying the organization's stated goal of educating, informing, fostering curiosity, and promoting civil discourse essential to American society, suggesting that instead it has merely bankrolled "Big Brother's propaganda outlet."

"The Corporation for Public Broadcasting refuses to provide Louisianans and Americans with fair, unbiased content," said Kennedy. "It wastes taxpayer dollars on slanted coverage to advance a leftist political agenda."

Mike Gonzalez, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation who has long written about the need to defund public broadcasting, emphasized to Blaze News that given the option of whether to defund the propaganda outfits or to defund the CPB altogether, the latter choice is optimal, although he'd personally seek to go farther.

Gonzalez, who indicated that no attempt at mending could justify keeping taxpayers on the hook for public broadcasting, said that Kennedy "going after the CPB is the right approach."

"I would prefer dissolving it," continued Gonzalez. "You can defund the CPB, but that only delays the problem. That's not a permanent solution."

'For my own part, I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS.'

While Gonzalez anticipates that the liberal media will continue to circle the wagons and gripe over the potential loss of taxpayer cash to fellow travelers, he suggested that those open to defunding public broadcasting should not lose sight of NPR's and PBS' long-standing efforts to antagonize at least half the population..

"My liberal friends say, 'Look, this is important. We need more journalism, not less journalism.' I don’t, first of all, think [NPR and PBS] are going to go away, but if they go away, I don’t care," said Gonzalez. "Second of all, you have to know what they're doing."

Gonzalez noted that NPR and PBS "gave up any attempt at appearing impartial or objective in any way," adding that in the case of NPR, the choice of Maher as CEO was a crystal-clear message that things won't soon change for the better.

"Maher, on the record, is calling Trump racist. She was an enthusiastic supporter of Kamala Harris," said Gonzalez. "She's on the record as saying the First Amendment and our obsession with truth is getting in the way of consensus. Well, gee — that's the CEO of NPR. Anything else you need to know?"

Neither NPR nor PBS responded to Blaze News' request for comment by deadline.

Comeuppance

There is clearly blood in the water.

The Federal Communications Commission has public broadcasting in its sights, as does the new House Oversight Delivering on Government Efficiency subcommittee, which is chaired by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).

On Jan. 29, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr announced that the commission's enforcement bureau was opening an investigation into the airing of NPR and PBS programming across their various broadcast member stations.

Carr expressed concern that the two media outfits might be in violation of federal law by airing commercials. While apparently concerned that NPR and PBS member stations might be testing the boundaries of their federal noncommercial authorizations, Carr made no secret that the investigation could furnish lawmakers with further justification to pull the plug on the whole project.

"Congress is actively considering whether to stop requiring taxpayers to subsidize NPR and PBS programming," wrote Carr. "For my own part, I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS, given the changes in the media marketplace since the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967."

'We shouldn't be taxing the American people to fund radically left-wing propaganda.'

"To the extent that these taxpayer dollars are being used to support a for-profit endeavor or an entity that is airing commercial advertisements, then that would further undermine any case for continuing to fund NPR and PBS with taxpayer dollars," added Carr.

On Feb. 3, Greene invited the CEOs from NPR and PBS to testify at a hearing in March regarding their biased news coverage. Both Katherine Maher and Paula Kerger were notified that the hearing constitutes an opportunity to explain why they feel they deserve to continue receiving federal funds.

The subcommittee said in a release, "NPR and PBS have repeatedly undermined public trust by ignoring stories that were damaging to the Biden administration, dismissing genuine calls for balanced reporting, and pushing partisan coverage. As stewards of tax dollars, NPR and PBS have an obligation to provide objective and accurate coverage that serves all Americans."

When asked about the perceived need to defund NPR and PBS and the significance of doing so, a spokesman for Greene told Blaze News that the congresswoman "is looking forward to the hearing and questioning the heads of these publicly funded media outlets, and her letters speak for themselves."

In Greene's letters to the CEOs of the liberal media outfits, she noted on both occasions that as organizations that receive federal funds through their member stations, they should provide reporting that serves "the entire public, not just a narrow slice of like-minded individuals and ideological interest groups."

When asked about the prospect of defunding NPR and PBS or dissolving the CPB altogether, Rep. Brandon Gill (R-Texas), a member of the DOGE subcommittee, told Blaze News in a statement, "I fully support defunding these organizations and am exploring legislative options to ensure public funds are spent responsibly."

"We shouldn't be taxing the American people to fund radically left-wing propaganda," continued Gill. "Nothing about NPR or PBS is neutral, and taxpayers shouldn’t be forced to bankroll news organizations that hate them and everything they stand for."

While NPR appears set in its ways, PBS — having seen the writing on the wall — appears eager to placate some of its harshest critics by doing the bare minimum: its lawful obligation.

A PBS spokesman confirmed to the Hollywood Reporter on Feb. 10 that the organization had shuttered its race-obsessed DEI office in order to comply with President Donald Trump's executive order "ending radical and wasteful government DEI programs and preference."

"The staff members who served in that office are leaving PBS. We will continue to adhere to our mission and values. PBS will continue to reflect all of America and remain a welcoming place for everyone," the spokesman said in a statement.

While it was apparently easy to shutter the DEI office and kick to the curb Cecilia Loving, the organization's senior vice president of DEI, eliminating political bias at PBS and NPR would be a herculean feat with no promise of a lasting solution.

When condemning the use of taxpayer funds for public broadcasting during the first Trump administration, Mike Gonzalez appealed to Thomas Jefferson to help make his point, quoting the third president as saying, "To compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagations of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical.

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SCOTUS lets Biden-Harris admin continue denying federal funds to Oklahoma because it won't refer mothers for abortion



The Biden-Harris administration has withheld millions of dollars in federal funds from Oklahoma over its refusal to provide abortion referrals to pregnant women.

The pro-life state sued the Biden-Harris Department of Health and Human Services and its secretary, Xavier Becerra, earlier this year, seeking a reinstatement of over $4.5 million in family-planning grants. The case was kicked up through the courts until ultimately the state's application for writ of injunction went before the U.S. Supreme Court.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court court denied Oklahoma's request, indicating that Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch would have granted the application.

Background

The grant program at the heart of the case was established in 1970 under Title X of the Public Health Service Act. Congress tasked the HHS with determining the eligibility requirements for the funds.

In 2021, the Biden-Harris HHS renewed two conditions: first, that family-planning projects must provide pregnant women with the opportunity to receive "neutral, factual information and nondirective counseling" regarding possible options, including abortion. Second, projects had to provide a referral regarding all options when requested.

The following year, the Oklahoma State Department of Health was approved for one such grant — from April 2022 to March 2023. However, just months into the term, Oklahoma's abortion ban took effect, and the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs ruling, indicating there is no nationwide right to an abortion.

After Dobbs, the Biden-Harris HHS rushed to inform Oklahoma and other grant recipients that the high court's decision would not free them from their supposed obligation to continue referring pregnant women for abortion in order to receive the federal grant money.

Oklahoma effectively told the federal government to pound sand, changing its policies on the basis of state law.

The HHS rejected Oklahoma's changes and suggested the state could comply by other means; namely, by providing pregnant women with the phone number for a glorified abortion referral hotline.

Oklahoma rejected that half-measure and stopped sharing information about the hotline, prompting the Biden-Harris administration to terminate the grant — a strategy it has pursued also with Tennessee.

'Diminishing healthcare services in this way harms the public interest.'

Oklahoma challenged the decision. When a federal judge declined to compel the Biden-Harris administration to cough up the money, Oklahoma appealed to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, which ruled 2-1 to allow the HHS to continue withholding the money.

Arguments

Oklahoma noted that despite the Weldon Amendment — which bars federal agencies and programs from subjecting "any institutional or individual health care entity to discrimination on the basis that the health care entity does not provide, pay for, provide coverage of, or refer for abortions" — the HHS stripped it of all Title X funds because its OSDH "declined to refer for abortions after Oklahoma's historic abortion prohibition was revitalized in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization."

The state asked the high court to consider whether the HHS had indeed violated the Weldon Amendment as well as whether it was violating the Constitution's spending clause by requiring abortion referrals.

Oklahoma also argued that Congress' spending power precluded it from delegating the grant eligibility requirements to the HHS, reported the New York Times.

According to SCOTUSblog, U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, who represented the Biden-Harris administration, told Supreme Court justices that the Weldon Amendment has not been violated because the OSDH is "not protected" under the amendment.

Prelogar also suggested that the requirement for abortion referrals did not violate the Constitution's spending clause because Congress "routinely conditions federal grants on compliance with requirements contained in agency regulations, and this Court has repeatedly upheld such requirements."

The Biden-Harris administration's representative further suggested to the justices that contrary to Oklahoma's characterization of the funds as a critical "part of the frontline of health care" in the state, this was ultimately a dispute with "modest practical stakes."

Several pro-life and religious medical associations who previously filed an amicus curiae with the 10th Circuit, stressed that the HHS' rule "threatens to reduce the resources available to members of the public who seek fertility services, family-planning information, and other medical services from healthcare professionals who share their beliefs about abortion and the sanctity of human life. Diminishing healthcare services in this way harms the public interest."

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White House Rewrites History With Claim That Republicans, Not Democrats, Tried To Defund The Police

"Some might say," such as White House press secretary Jen Psaki, that Republicans were "for defunding the police," but those people are wrong.