Yale and 35 other U.S. colleges and universities nationwide filed a legal brief on July 22 to assist judicial review in a lawsuit challenging the federal government's freezing of federal grants and contracts based on allegations of discrimination.
In an amicus curiae, or "friend of the court," brief filed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, the institutions argue that "academic research generates breakthroughs that save and improve lives, build economies, and foster human flourishing. And it requires federal funding to do so."
The brief, filed in a lawsuit brought by Harvard University, notes that the substantial investment made by the federal government into scientific research at U.S. universities over the past 80 years has yielded essential breakthroughs including radar technology that helped win the Second World War, computer systems that enabled the moon landing, and life-saving vaccines. Many of these breakthroughs, the brief notes, emerged from research that may have had a different aim or "basic research" that seeks to expand knowledge without any immediate practical application.
Universities provide a unique home for such research, the brief notes, because the private sector has no clear financial incentive to pursue it. Yet universities generally cannot support such research on their own.
In April 2025, Harvard sued the federal administration over its decision to freeze nearly $2.2 billion of federal grants and contracts for the university, based on allegations of campus antisemitism. In September, a federal judge struck down the government's freeze of funding. The federal government appealed the ruling.
The new amicus brief urges the appeals court to affirm the judge's ruling.
It argues that the federal government and U.S. universities and colleges have enjoyed a longstanding collaboration to advance scientific research, beginning after the Civil War and accelerating with the advent of the Second World War. Since then, the federal government has recognized the essential role academic scientific research played in establishing and maintaining U.S. leadership in the world.
University research "has delivered enormous long-term benefits to the American public - contributing to everything from nuclear reactors to cancer treatments to Google," the brief notes. Academic work supported by the federal government has laid the foundation for sequencing the human genome, for the architecture of the Internet, and for life-saving liver transplantation - and "propelled the United States to preeminence on the world stage," the brief argues, while also serving as a "powerful driver of America's economic growth."
"Extensive and arbitrary cuts to federal research funding to universities and colleges threaten much of what has made the U.S. research enterprise a juggernaut of growth and prosperity," the brief contends, and "the wholesale termination of federal research funding at just one leading university can have devastating effects on scientific progress and the public welfare."
The competitive process for receiving federal funding for research initiatives is "based on scientific merit and their ability to create value for the American people," the brief states. "In exchange, the country's top scientists harness federal resources to achieve breakthroughs in fields from nuclear power to biomedicine to computer science."
Noting the collaborative nature of modern research, in which researchers work across institutions, the brief points out that "the withdrawal of federal support at even one institution is thus a blow to the entire ecosystem and deters the long-term investment necessary for scientific and technological progress."
Loss of funding will also create long-term deficits for American science, the brief adds, as it will erode the pipeline for the next generation of researchers and scholars and push them into other fields or abroad.
Funding may change based on budgetary constraints or changing priorities, the brief acknowledges. But the termination of funding based on ideological objections or concerns about a single aspect of a university's conduct, the brief argues, violates the constitutional principles and federal statutes that protect against the harm such actions could cause institutions and the public interest.
Further, universities themselves may be deterred from making a long-term commitment of resources and talent toward government-supported initiatives if it seems likely that federal funding may be rescinded "without any meaningful procedural safeguards and based on arbitrary judgments that are unrelated to either the goals of the funded research or legitimate government fiscal constraints."
"In sum, terminating funding to universities and colleges jeopardizes American innovation and economic growth by severely limiting their ability to play their vital, longstanding roles in expanding scientific knowledge," the brief states. "These cuts to research funding risk a future where the next pathbreaking innovation - whether it is a cure for cancer or Alzheimer's, a military technology, or the next Internet - is discovered beyond our shores, if at all."
