Harvard Spends Record Amount on Lobbying in First Quarter of 2025 As It Fends Off Federal Threats

Harvard spent $230,000 on federal lobbying in the first quarter of 2025 — its highest quarterly total since George W. Bush’s presidency — as the University tries to fortify itself against attacks from Congress and the White House.

The total includes $90,000 to Ballard Partners, a lobbying firm with ties to several of President Trump’s top advisers. The filing period, which runs from January to March, predates a series of major attacks launched by the federal government in April — including a multibillion dollar federal funding freeze and two congressional investigations into compliance with civil rights laws and potential antitrust violations.

The administration’s recent actions against Harvard span many of the issues that the University was already lobbying on in the first three months of 2025, per filings released on Tuesday, including student visas, endowment taxation, academic freedom, and most prominently, research funding.

Most prominently, the Trump administration paused $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million in multi-year contracts April 14 after Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 issued a rebuke of its demands of the University.

Pauses in federal research funding came as the National Institute of Health had already terminated research grants worth more than $110 million to Harvard and its affiliated hospitals from February 28 to April 1.

The Trump administration also reportedly revoked hundreds of student visas throughout April, including those of 12 Harvard affiliates, and directed the IRS to investigate Harvard’s nonprofit and tax-exempt statuses on April 16.

In response to the freeze — and just one day after the Wall Street Journal reported that the administration planned to cut another $1 billion from Harvard health research funding — the University sued the administration.

In 2024, Harvard’s annual lobbying spend climbed 17 percent from the previous year to $620,000, marking its most aggressive federal advocacy push in over a decade​. But the 2025 first-quarter filings suggest the University is not merely maintaining that trajectory — it is escalating it.

The surge in expenditure — representing a 35 percent increase from the previous quarter — follows a trend across the Ivy League. Yale and the University of Pennsylvania each spent $250,000 on lobbying the federal government in the same time period, a 38 percent increase for both universities from their highest single quarter expenditure in 2024.

University spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment on the increase in spending.

When Harvard last spent a similar amount of $235,000 in the first quarter of 2008, the list of policies the University lobbied for included tobacco regulation, Native American grave repatriation, and patent reform. Although Harvard also lobbied on issues relating to student visas and endowment taxes in 2008, the lobbying filings from that year did not heavily feature topics of research funding or academic freedom.

—Staff writer Avani B. Rai can be reached at avani.rai@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @avaniiiirai.

—Staff writer Saketh Sundar can be reached at saketh.sundar@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @saketh_sundar.