Nearly Half of Princeton U.’s Federal Funding Has Reportedly Been Frozen by the Trump Administration

The Trump administration has reportedly frozen $210 million in federal funding for Princeton University, the next target in a campaign to go after institutions it believes are failing to suppress antisemitism on campus. The report came from the conservative news outlet The Daily Caller on X; Princeton confirmed on Tuesday that it had been notified of dozens of suspended grants but did not confirm the total sum at stake.

That reported sum would amount to almost half of the money Princeton receives from the government: In the 2024 fiscal year, the university accepted $455 million in federal grants and contracts.

The funding pause comes after Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, published an opinion essay in The Atlantic on March 19 calling the Trump administration’s targeting of Columbia University “a radical threat to scholarly excellence and to America’s leadership in research.” Eisgruber added that “universities and their leaders should speak up and litigate forcefully to protect their rights.”

Princeton joins Columbia, which agreed to a sweeping set of demands — including changing rules for campus protest and processes for student discipline, increasing on-campus policing powers, and adopting a new definition of antisemitism — in hopes of restoring $400 million in canceled grants and contracts, and Harvard University, which learned Monday that the government would review its $9 billion in federal funding over antisemitism concerns. Harvard and Columbia were among the 10 institutions singled out in February by the Trump administration’s antisemitism task force; Princeton was not.

The University of Pennsylvania and the University of Maine system have also had hundreds of millions in funding paused over policies related to transgender athletes’ participation in sports; Trump has alleged that the institutions violated Title IX. Maine’s federal dollars have since been unpaused.

In a Tuesday message to the university community, Eisgruber said that Princeton would “comply with the law.” The institution, he wrote, is “committed to fighting antisemitism and all forms of discrimination, and we will cooperate with the government in combating antisemitism. Princeton will also vigorously defend academic freedom and the due process rights of this University.”

Eisgruber said that on Monday and Tuesday, the institution was notified by government agencies — among them the Department of Energy, NASA, and the Defense Department — that “several dozen” research grants had been suspended. “The full rationale for this action is not yet clear,” he wrote.

A Princeton spokesperson did not answer further questions about the grant suspensions, including confirming the exact amount of funding at stake. The Education Department referred a request for comment to the Department of Health and Human Services, which did not immediately respond. Princeton does not receive as much government money as Columbia, Harvard, and Penn; it ranked 80th in federally funded research-and-development expenditures in 2023, according to federal data.

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Princeton has been under investigation by the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights since April 2024, during the Biden administration. The case was opened after Zachary Marschall, editor in chief of the conservative website Campus Reform, filed a complaint alleging the university had failed to respond to antisemitism in the wake of the October 7 attacks in Gaza. That complaint is one of at least a dozen Title VI claims Marschall has filed, The Daily Princetonian reported at the time.

The Office of Civil Rights also named Princeton in a March 2025 list of 60 institutions facing scrutiny for potential antisemitism, noting “potential enforcement actions” if an institution failed to protect Jewish students. The funding freeze does not constitute the end of that investigation, The Daily Caller reported. “Princeton has perpetuated racist and antisemitic policies,” a federal official told that outlet.

Like many other colleges, Princeton has seen a spate of protests related to the war in Gaza, including a three-week sit-in a year ago calling for the university to cut financial and academic ties with Israel.

But there has been far less turmoil at Princeton than at institutions like Columbia, Harvard, and Penn, whose relatively new presidents were called before Congress in 2023 and 2024 to testify about their responses to campus antisemitism — and faced blowback from House Republicans and conservative activists over what the critics cast as a failure to protect Jewish students and employees. All three university leaders resigned in the aftermath.

Eisgruber, who has led Princeton since 2013, also chairs the board of directors of the Association of American Universities, which on Monday issued a statement decrying the “withdrawal of research funding for reasons unrelated to research.”

The AAU board’s statement encouraged the Trump administration and Congress to use established procedures for investigating allegations of discrimination, “in accordance with principles of due process.”