A blandly titled law from 1946 may play a key role in Harvard’s lawsuit against the Trump administration

Harvard claims Trump’s executive branch isn’t following federal rules for changing key government policies.

Soon after the Trump administration announced it was cutting billions of dollars in grants to Harvard University following a breakdown in discussions over antisemitism on campus, the Ivy League institution pulled out the biggest weapon in the federal legal arsenal: the First Amendment. “The Government’s attempt to coerce and control Harvard disregards … fundamental First Amendment principles,” Harvard’s lawsuit says. But while citing the Bill of Rights’ best-known guarantee is an attention-grabber – both for judges and the general public – a more arcane issue is the focus of many of the lawsuit’s 51 pages: Harvard’s claim Trump’s executive branch isn’t following federal rules for changing key government policies. In particular, the Administrative Procedure Act “requires this Court to hold unlawful and set aside any final agency action that is ‘arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law,’” Harvard says in its lawsuit. It was only hours after its talks with Harvard fell apart that the White House froze $2.2 billion fueling much of the school’s research, a breakneck response that mirrors the pace of sweeping changes on issues from immigration and tariff policy to federal staffing by an administration that prefers quick, unilateral action to deliberation and compromise. “No administration has done anything like this before precisely because there are procedures in place to restrain this kind of extreme thing,” David A. Super, a professor of administrative and constitutional law at Georgetown and Yale, told CNN.