Billions of dollars in federal contracts and grants issued to Columbia University hang in the balance as President Trump’s antisemitism task force investigates the school’s “ongoing inaction in the face of relentless harassment of Jewish students,” three federal agencies have announced. 

The probe, the task force’s first undertaking, sets the stage for the first test of the Trump administration’s more aggressive approach to tackling campus antisemitism. As part of the investigation, the task force will consider issuing stop work orders for $51.4 million in ongoing government contracts and will evaluate whether the Ivy League university remains eligible to continue to receive more than $5 billion in federal funding commitments. 

The Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the General Services Administration announced the move less than a day after Linda McMahon was confirmed as Secretary of Education. 

“Institutions that receive federal funds have a responsibility to protect all students from discrimination,” Ms. McMahon stated in the press release. “Columbia’s apparent failure to uphold their end of this basic agreement raises very serious questions about the institution’s fitness to continue doing business with the United States government.”

Tuesday morning, President Trump doubled down on his administration’s strong-armed approach, declaring on social media that “All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests.” He added that “Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. American students will be permanently expelled or, depending on the crime, arrested.” Mr. Trump further decried: “NO MASKS!”

The investigation centers around Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits federally funded programs from discriminating based on “race, color, or national origin.” In 2004, the protection was clarified to include religion by then-secretary for the Department of Education, Kenneth Marcus. 

A free speech advocacy group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, pushed back on Mr. Trump’s Tuesday pledge, arguing that the president “does not have unilateral authority to revoke federal funds, even for colleges that allow ‘illegal’ protests.” Rather, the group claims, the government has to take the case to federal court or to Congress.

According to Mr. Marcus, a leading expert on civil rights in education, the 47th president “is on firm ground defunding schools that tolerate unlawful protests, assuming that they violate federal law and that the Trump team follows the appropriate process,” he tells the Sun. He notes, though, that “the devil is in the details.” 

The task force, which is headed by the Senior Counsel to the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Leo Terrell, was assembled in February after Mr. Trump issued an executive order on “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism.” Last week, the group announced its plans to visit Columbia and nine other universities regarding “allegations that the schools may have failed to protect Jewish students and faculty members from unlawful discrimination, in potential violation of federal law.” 

Beyond Columbia, the task force is slated to visit George Washington University, Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, New York University, Northwestern University, the University of California Los Angeles, the University of California Berkeley, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Southern California. 

Columbia, though, is the only university currently being investigated by three different agencies — the Department of Justice, the Department of Education, and the Department of Health and Human Services — over its alleged mishandling of campus antisemitism. 

Following Hamas’s October 7 attack at Israel, the New York City-based Ivy became the scene of some of the most violent anti-Israel protests in the nation, including one incident last spring in which student and non-student agitators violently took over an administrative building, Hamilton Hall. 

A year and a half later, the school is still struggling to protect its Jewish students from harassment and discrimination. According to a campus antisemitism “report card” issued by the Anti-Defamation League, Columbia failed to improve from the D grade it was handed last year. Its Ivy-League peers, however, had more success: Harvard University moved up two grades to a C from an F and Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania each jumped up to a C from a D. 

The university responded to the notice in a statement on Monday night, writing that “Columbia is fully committed to combatting antisemitism and all forms of discrimination, and we are resolute that calling for, promoting, or glorifying violence or terror has no place at our University.” The university added that its leaders “look forward to ongoing work with the new federal administration to fight antisemitism.” 

The Trump administration’s move to review government contracts, Mr. Marcus tells the Sun, “is a massive increase in the pressure brought to bear on college presidents.” Along with the task force’s other investigations, “we’re now seeing the most powerful federal attack on campus anti-Semitism ever,” he adds. 

A cohort of Columbia students, faculty, and alumni warn that the consequences of the funding cuts would be “catastrophic.” The Stand Columbia Society — a non-partisan organization dedicated to restoring the New York City Ivy’s “excellence” — predicts that the loss of government funding would diminish Columbia “from a world-class research institution to a tuition-dependent teaching college.” The group frets that “even the threat” of funding cuts “could deter prospective students, faculty, and research partnerships, dealing a devastating blow to the university’s future.”