Mass General Brigham Leaders React to Trump White House Threats Against Harvard
A dispute between the Trump administration and Harvard University could potentially impact Mass General Brigham health system, which is the health system affiliated with the university.
An article published on April 15 by the news staff of the Harvard Crimson, the newspaper of the Cambridge, Mass.-based university, began thus: “Mass General Brigham CEO Anne Klibanski responded to funding threats against its hospitals in an email to employees on Monday night, writing that the impact of the federal funding freeze on MGB and Harvard Medical School’s other teaching hospitals ‘remains unknown.’ Klibanski distanced MGB’s hospitals from Harvard University in her message, emphasizing that ‘the government’s requests of Harvard University are not applicable to our separately incorporated and independently operated medical and research hospitals.’”
The Crimson staff quoted Klibanski as stating that “We do not set Harvard University’s policies with respect to its students, faculty and other employees, or conduct on its campus.”
As the Crimson staff noted, “The email came just hours after a tumultuous day for Harvard, which began with an announcement by Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 that the University would not comply with a slate of demands on its diversity programming and protests policies imposed by the Trump administration last week.” President Garber wrote in an open letter on Monday that “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” reported the Boston Globe’s Jonathan Saltzman, Robert Weisman, Mike Damiano, Chris Serres, and Liz Kowalczyk on April 15.
The Globe team also quoted Klibanski as stating that she didn't know what impact the freeze would have on MGB and Harvard Medical School. “However, we believe that the government's requests of Harvard University are not applicable to our separately incorporated and independently operated medical and research hospitals,” she said.
The Globe reporters also noted that “Harvard-affiliated hospitals may be benefiting from an anomaly in how they are legally structured. Unlike many other teaching hospitals in the country, which are owned by universities that receive federal grants, Harvard-affiliated hospitals are independent nonprofit institutions. Under an agreement that has been in effect for decades, the hospitals agree to teach Harvard medical students, and Harvard agrees to give hospital physicians appointments at Harvard Medical School.”
The conflict between the White House and Harvard University took a new turn on April 15, as President Donald Trump threatened to revoke Harvard’s tax-exempt status. As the New York Times’s Tyler Pager, Andrew Duehren, Maggie Harberman, and Jonathan Swan wrote on Tuesday afternoon, “President Trump threatened Harvard University’s tax-exempt status on Tuesday after the school rebuffed his administration’s demands for a series of policy changes, a dramatic escalation in the feud between the president and the nation’s richest and oldest university. The threat came a day after the Trump administration halted more than $2 billion in federal funding for Harvard because the university rejected changes to its hiring and admissions practices and curriculum. Mr. Trump decided to ratchet up his pressure campaign after watching news coverage of Harvard’s resistance on Monday night, according to a person with knowledge of the president’s deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.”
The Times reporters quoted President Trump as posting on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday morning that “Perhaps Harvard should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity if it keeps pushing political, ideological, and terrorist inspired/supporting ‘Sickness?’ Remember, Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!” The reporters wrote that “White House officials said Tuesday that the Internal Revenue Service would make its decision about Harvard’s tax-exempt status independently, but the president has made clear in private that he has no intention of backing down from the fight with the university.”
Meanwhile, the Globe’s Jonathan Salzman reported on April 14 that, “As the Trump administration threatens to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from Harvard University and its affiliates, more than 220 physicians and other workers at Mass General Brigham have called on leaders of the health system to reject a litany of demands by the government. In a signed letter sent to top executives on Monday, employees of the Harvard-affiliated system said MGB and other teaching hospitals in the country should band together and stand up for diversity, evidence-based medicine, and preservation of constitutional rights,” he wrote.
“The call to action came the same day Harvard said it would not comply with new demands from the Trump administration, with president Alan Garber saying the school would not ‘negotiate over its independence or its constitutional rights,’ Saltzman continued. The letter to MGB’s leadership marks the first time the state’s largest health system has received public pressure from its employees to resist federal funding threats.”
And, he added, “Dr. Marjorie Curran, a pediatrician at Mass General for Children who helped write the letter, said she has no doubt that MGB’s leaders want to preserve its mission. But she feels they have been conspicuously silent in the two weeks since the Trump administration announced it was reviewing $9 billion in federal funding to Harvard and then issued a list of demands.”
The team of Globe reporters wrote that there was a mood of anxiety among leaders at Harvard Medical School, along with support for taking a strong stance against the White House. “Dr. Bruce Fischl, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School who runs a neuroimaging lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, described the mood among his fellow researchers in the wake of the Education Department’s announcement as one of “cautious terror,’” the reporters wrote. “I’m super glad that Harvard stood up,” he told the reporters. “Columbia [University] was an object lesson. You can agree to everything, and you get nothing in return except more demands. It’s not really a negotiation at all…. If we band together, we have a chance to stop these illegal actions.”
The health system has been under significant financial pressure. As Becker’s Hospital Review’s Alan Condon reported back on March 10, “The second of two rounds of layoffs at Mass General Brigham began March 10, with about 1,500 employees reportedly affected by the overall workforce reductions, according to The Boston Globe. The layoffs, the largest in the Somerville, Mass.-based health system’s history, were announced in early February. The workforce cuts stem from “the same unrelenting pressures affecting many healthcare systems across the country,” as the system faces a projected budget gap of $250 million within two years, a spokesperson told Becker’s. Mass General Brigham, the largest health system in the state, said the layoffs primarily affect nonclinical and nonpatient-facing roles to ‘enhance efficiency, reduce costs and maximize support for front-line clinicians.’”
On that date, CEO Klibanski wrote in a message to Mass General Brigham staff that “This decision was reached by clinical, academic and administrative leaders from across our system after thoughtfully considering the current healthcare landscape and our poor financial performance over the past several years. As we look to the future, we will continue to build a culture of resource stewardship and financial sustainability that enables us to withstand the unrelenting pressures facing healthcare systems everywhere and allows us to continue with critical planned and future investments to support our patients, our care teams and our mission.”
