Republicans have spent the past decade accusing the Internal Revenue Service of political bias in how it determines which organizations are exempt from income taxes.
But now, as President Donald Trump is publicly suggesting that Harvard University should lose its tax-exempt status — and as his IRS has launched a review after the school defied administration demands — most Republicans on Capitol Hill don’t see a conflict between their previous stances on protecting the president’s ideological opponents from IRS scrutiny and their support for the president’s recent moves.
In interviews, Republicans argued Trump’s demands were in the public interest, pointing to instances of antisemitism on Harvard’s campus. Trump’s feud with Harvard goes beyond concerns about antisemitism, though — he’s called it a “liberal mess” and a “threat to democracy” on social media — and the administration demanded the school broadly change its policies as part of his administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Rep. James Comer told NOTUS antisemitism forced Trump to step in, and that an IRS probe is entirely fair.
“We’ve heard complaints from a lot of Jewish parents that said that their students felt intimidated and were scared to go to class at Harvard and other schools,” said Comer, who chairs the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. “The president’s trying to do what he can to ensure that there’s no antisemitism at these universities.”
Many GOP lawmakers simply don’t see wealthy Ivy League schools as particularly sympathetic victims.
“These universities are basically hedge funds that are using their tax-exempt status to build massive endowments to make outrageous sums of money,” Sen. Josh Hawley told NOTUS. “A lot of this money is taxpayer money. So I’m not very sympathetic to them when they say they want to maintain all of these breaks.”
“Why shouldn’t they pay at least the corporate rate?” he said.
Even though Republican lawmakers are focusing on civil rights and public interest arguments in Trump’s feud with Harvard, the president is expanding his list of targets for IRS scrutiny. He told reporters earlier this month that his administration is “looking at” the nonprofit watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which has investigated his business interests.
“The only charity they had is going after Donald Trump. So we’re looking at that,” Trump said. “We’re looking at a lot of things.”
Trump’s fight with Harvard has steadily escalated since he took office in January. Earlier this month, the administration sent a letter demanding changes to Harvard’s policies, including an end to any admissions or hiring preferences based on race, religion, sex or national origin. The letter also required Harvard to more closely police its students’ speech and report instances of antisemitism or support for terrorist groups to federal authorities, among other mandates.
Harvard president Alan Garber said the letter’s “sweeping and intrusive demands” would “impose unprecedented and improper control over the university.” The school has challenged the administration’s decision to halt federal aid after it rejected the letter’s demands — but its tax-exempt status is a different question. Ending Harvard’s tax exemption would subject the university’s endowment to income taxes and prevent donors from claiming exemptions for charitable gifts when filing their own taxes.
Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who graduated from Harvard’s law school, said during an episode of his podcast earlier this month that the administration’s demands were reasonable.
“Harvard has been the locus of much of the radical leftism and cultural Marxism that has done enormous damage to our institutions,” Cruz said. “They love discriminating on race. They love DEI, they love putting race front and center, which, by the way, is directly contrary to federal civil rights law. And they also want to continue admitting radical antisemites.”
In 2015, Cruz slammed the IRS for targeting Tea Party groups for tax exemption review, such as investigating organizations with “patriots” or “tea party” in their names. He said that “if a Republican president did this, as Richard Nixon tried, I can assure you I would be every bit as loud and clear that it is an abuse of power.”
But in this instance, Cruz is arguing Trump’s moves aren’t about politics — and that this is a civil rights issue. A lengthy report this week from a Harvard task force found that antisemitism had affected coursework and left Jewish and Israeli students feeling like social outcasts and sometimes physically unsafe.
“Across Harvard, non-Jewish students unconnected to Israel told our Task Force that they had come under social pressure to end friendships with Israeli students,” the report reads. “American Jewish students told us similar stories, where they felt pressure to condemn Israel to prove they were ‘one of the good ones.’”
Lawsuits against Harvard in the wake of pro-Palestinian protests claimed that the university failed to protect its Jewish and Israeli students, violating the Civil Rights Act. The school settled lawsuits related to antisemitism earlier this year, saying it would define antisemitism to include some forms of anti-Israel speech, train staff about it and publish yearly reports on campus harassment and discrimination.
“Harvard is not protecting the civil rights of their students,” Florida Rep. Byron Donalds told NOTUS this week. “So if you’re not going to protect civil rights, why are you living under nonprofit status?”
And Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said it’s “clear that Harvard is practicing ideology capture as opposed to viewpoint diversity, which leads directly, and/or indirectly, to Harvard’s teaching of the importance of diversity, equity inclusion and the right to hurt Jewish people.”
“And that’s not in the public interest,” he said.
A few Republicans seemed slightly uncomfortable that Trump keeps weighing in on the IRS’s decisions about tax exemption.
“That’s been used the other way around,” Sen. John Cornyn told NOTUS of political views affecting tax exemption decisions. “You may remember some of the Tea Party groups and the like. I’d be very reluctant.”
Cornyn would prefer Congress to consider a policy change to tax large university endowments: “The endowment tax issue may be the best way to address some of these universities that seem to be hoarding huge amounts of money, not spending it necessarily on students and then asking the federal government for a handout.”
And Sen. James Lankford said tax exemption “should be neutral for everybody, regardless of their political perspectives.”
Whatever happens, Sen. Mike Rounds expressed optimism that the Trump administration — whose officials have separately feuded with judges around the country for ruling against the president and have suggested he is not actually subject to judicial review — will follow the law.
“I’m sure the president will follow what the law says,” he told NOTUS.
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.