The Trump administration on Wednesday said it will pause $175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania, amid an ongoing investigation into campus policies governing transgender athletes’ participation in sports.
As of Wednesday afternoon, Penn officials said they hadn’t heard from the federal government. The university had not received “any official notification or any details” of a funding freeze, a spokesperson said in an email to The Chronicle.
In a post on X, the White House said the pause is due to Penn’s “policies forcing women to compete with men in sports.” Fox News broke the news, reporting that a senior administration official had told Fox Business, “This is just a taste of what could be coming down the pipe for Penn.”
It was not immediately clear which grants could be affected by a funding pause. According to the Fox report, the freeze will apply to money from the Department of Defense and the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the National Institutes of Health. Penn received about $1 billion in federal funding across nearly 200 grant or loan programs in the 2023 fiscal year, according to the most recent data available.
HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and the Defense Department deferred to the White House. A senior official told The Daily Pennsylvanian that the funding freeze was “immediate proactive action” to review discretionary funding to the university, which “infamously permitted a male to compete on its women’s swimming team.”
The official was likely alluding to past controversies around Lia Thomas, a transgender woman, and her participation on Penn’s swimming and diving team three years ago. During the 2021-22 season, Thomas won a national title in the 500-yard freestyle and set several program and conference records. Thomas graduated from Penn in 2022.
Thomas’s success helped spark an activist movement opposing the policies that enabled her to participate on the women’s team. (Thomas had been part of the men’s team from 2017 to 2019.) In February, three former Penn swimmers who competed with Thomas filed a lawsuit claiming that Penn, Harvard University, the Ivy League, and the NCAA violated Title IX, the gender-equity law, by allowing Thomas to compete in the 2022 Ivy League championships.
The Education Department in February announced it would investigate Penn, Trump’s alma mater, along with San Jose State University and the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association, for alleged Title IX infractions. Those investigations followed an executive order from President Trump barring transgender women from participating in women’s sports and using women’s locker rooms; the National Collegiate Athletic Association swiftly changed its policies to align with the order.
From 2011 to 2021, transgender athletes had generally been allowed to compete on NCAA teams based on their gender identity. In January 2022, during Thomas’s last season, the NCAA voted to adopt a sport-by-sport approach, where programs followed the rules set by their sport’s national governing body.
On Wednesday, the Penn spokesperson said the university has always followed NCAA policies for student participation in sports. “We have been in the past, and remain today, in full compliance with the regulations that apply to not only Penn, but all of our NCAA and Ivy League peer institutions,” the spokesperson added.
Penn isn’t the first university to face potential cuts from the Trump administration. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture paused, then unpaused, $100 million in federal grants to the University of Maine system after Trump clashed with the state’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, over transgender participation in sports.
The Trump administration also canceled $400 million in federal grants to Columbia University, an unprecedented move targeting what Trump and his allies see as a failure on Columbia’s part to adequately address antisemitism on campus since the outbreak of violence in Gaza after October 7, 2023. Last spring, Columbia students spurred a nationwide protest movement when they were the first to erect a pro-Palestinian encampment on campus.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that Columbia is working on an agreement to comply with Trump’s list of demands — including expelling student protesters and placing a department on academic receivership — to have its funding reconsidered.
Before Wednesday’s announcement, federal funding at Penn — like at many colleges — was already in limbo. Penn would lose $240 million under a proposed 15-percent cap on indirect-cost reimbursements for NIH grants. The cap, which is currently on pause after legal challenges and a court injunction, would immediately leave multi-million-dollar holes in research universities’ budgets. Because of funding uncertainties, Penn has joined other colleges in freezing hiring and reducing graduate admissions in some schools.
Kirsten Lydic, a Ph.D. student at Penn’s Annenberg School for Communication, said graduate students hadn’t received any formal communication from the university about Wednesday’s announcement from the Trump administration. Lydic said the news compounds existing concerns about the future of her work.
“Mostly, right now, I’m worried about everything being impacted,” Lydic said in a message to The Chronicle. But in her lab, “We’re continuing our research and keeping in mind to not comply in advance with anything, and not hold back from doing what we think is important research.”
Faculty hadn’t received official word from the university yet, either, said Anna Schapiro, an assistant professor in psychology. The lab Schapiro works in receives NIH funding, and the lab’s grant funding for this year had already been stalled since Trump took office.
“We are very worried and horrified,” Schapiro said.
Dan Bauman contributed to this article.
