The Trump administration said Wednesday that it would suspend about $175 million in federal funding to the University of Pennsylvania over its approach to transgender athletes, according to a White House social media account that trumpeted the pause. The move would intensify the government’s campaign against transgender people’s participation in public life and escalate a clash with elite colleges.

The White House’s rapid response account on social platform X said the decision was based on Penn’s “policies forcing women to compete with men in sports.” A person familiar with the decision, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the administration had not formally announced the pause, confirmed the suspension and cited Penn’s past embrace of Lia Thomas, a transgender woman, as a member of its women’s swim team.

University of Pennsylvania Hasn’t Received Official Notice

In a statement, Penn said that it was “aware of media reports suggesting a suspension of $175 million in federal funding to Penn” but that it had not “received any official notification or any details” from the government. The university added that it had been, and remained, “in full compliance with the regulations that apply to not only Penn, but all of our NCAA and Ivy League peer institutions.”

Penn, President Donald Trump’s alma mater, is the second Ivy League university in two weeks to be so explicitly targeted by the administration. The administration announced March 7 that it was pausing about $400 million in contracts and grants involving Columbia University. Last week, U.S. officials sent Columbia a list of demands that they said needed to be met before negotiations about the canceled funding could begin.

Dozens more schools are facing federal inquiries and are being squeezed by the administration’s broad efforts to cut federal spending.

The administration’s move against Penn, which was first reported by Fox Business, came about three years after Thomas won an NCAA title in the 500-yard freestyle. Before her victory, more than a dozen members of Penn’s swim team complained, in an anonymous letter to the university and the Ivy League, that Thomas enjoyed “an unfair advantage over competition in the women’s category.”

Thomas was a talented athlete, they acknowledged, who had been a top-tier swimmer in the Ivy League. But they insisted that her achievements in women’s competitions were “feats she could never have done as a male athlete.”

Thomas graduated soon after, and a decision from swimming’s international governing body kept her from competing for a spot on the United States’ Olympic team. She could not be reached for comment Wednesday, and a lawyer who has represented her in the past did not respond to a message.

The acrimony over her Penn career has lingered, in part, because of Trump’s decision to make the participation of transgender people in sports a signature rallying cry during last year’s campaign and once he returned to power.

Three Former Penn Swimmers Sue

In February, one day after three former Penn swimmers sued the university and others over Thomas’ participation, he issued an executive order that declared it to be “the policy of the United States to rescind all funds from educational programs that deprive women and girls of fair athletic opportunities.”

The next day, the Department of Education said it would investigate whether Penn had violated Title IX. The department’s announcement quoted a Penn swimmer, Paula Scanlan, saying she had been “forced to compete against and share a locker room with a male athlete.”

The Daily Pennsylvanian, the campus newspaper, reported that Penn’s athletic department removed a website about diversity, equity and inclusion, which had included the university’s policy about transgender participation, soon after.

Trump’s executive order also led the NCAA, which sponsors competition for more than 500,000 college athletes, to decide that transgender women would be forbidden from competing in women’s events.

Universities Brace for Financial Storm

Penn, like many other universities, had already been bracing for a financial storm. A threatened change involving National Institutes of Health funding, the university has warned, could cost it about $240 million a year. If other federal agencies adopt similar formulas, the toll could rise to roughly $315 million annually, according to Penn.

The university said this month that it was imposing freezes on hiring and midyear salary adjustments, as well as starting reviews of capital spending and faculty hiring.

“The scope and pace of the possible disruptions we face may make them more severe than those of previous challenges, such as the 2008 financial crisis or the COVID pandemic,” Provost John L. Jackson Jr. and Craig R. Carnaroli, Penn’s senior executive vice president, wrote in an open letter announcing steps like the hiring freeze.

The person familiar with the decision said Wednesday’s cuts were not a result of the Department of Education’s investigation into Penn but amounted to “immediate proactive action to review discretionary funding streams.” That suggests more funding reductions could be in the offing, with repercussions beyond this week’s anticipated loss of money from the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense.

The administration did not immediately detail specific Penn programs that stood to lose funding. But any cuts tied to medical science would be a blow to the university, which prizes its hospitals and laboratories. (Medical sciences are so integral to the university at large that trustees voted last week to name J. Larry Jameson, an endocrinologist who had previously been the medical school dean, as Penn’s president.)

Penn has an endowment of roughly $22 billion, which university officials say supports about 20% of the operating budget. Replacing lost funding, though, is not always as simple as tapping into such a war chest, and university officials across the country have been studying how long they could underwrite projects without federal backing.

Johns Hopkins University, which boasts an endowment of about $13 billion, said last week that it would eliminate more than 2,000 jobs that had been connected to federal money.

At Columbia, dozens of scientific studies may soon shut down after the NIH moved to end more than 400 grants involving the university.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Alan Blinder and Michael C. Bender/Eric Lee
c. 2025 The New York Times Company