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47
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Harvard hasn't caved to Donald Trump yet, so Trump is upping the pressure. Now he is threatening to take away Harvard's patents, allegedly because Harvard might not have complied with federal laws relating to patents. Needless to say, Harvard has access to some pretty good lawyers and it is unlikely that they made any errors when filing patent applications. Still, Trump is absolutely determined to beat Harvard (and other top universities) into submission and will try every tactic until he finds one that works. That there is no serious legal basis to what he is doing is of no interest to him. The patents are worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, who is carrying the ball for Trump on this one, said: "We believe that Harvard has failed to live up to its obligations to the American taxpayer and is in breach of the statutory, regulatory, and contractual requirements tied to Harvard's federally funded research programs and intellectual property arising therefrom." It is common, and perfectly legal, for universities to file for patents for inventions that are made as part of federally funded research done by their professors and students. Universities then license companies to use the patents. The companies pay licensing fees or royalties to the universities for use of the patents. This is the mechanism by which federally funded research turns into products and services that help Americans. This arrangement has worked well for more than 75 years and no one has ever complained about it before.
Lutnick has ordered Harvard to produce a list of all patents it has that stem from federal grants to see if they comply with the Bayh-Dole Act, which requires inventions coming out of federal research to be used to benefit Americans. For each patent, Lutnick wants to know if the patent is being used, the details of the licensing agreements, and where any manufacturing is taking place. A spokesperson from Harvard said: "Technologies and patents developed at Harvard are life-saving and industry-redefining. We are fully committed to complying with the Bayh-Dole Act and ensuring that the public is able to access and benefit from the many innovations that arise out of federally funded research at Harvard."
Of course, Trump has no interest in the Bayh-Dole Act. He just wants ways to punish Harvard if it refuses to submit to him. With Trump, the first thing he generally thinks of is money, so ways to punish universities financially are always on the top of his to-do list.
While attacks on Harvard, Columbia, and other top universities are getting the most attention, grants are being unilaterally terminated at many universities across the country. Thousands of grants from NIH, NSF, EPA, and other federal agencies have been prematurely terminated because they deal with clean energy, climate change, "woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences" and other areas Trump wants to stamp out. In many cases, the universities or the state governments are suing the federal government for terminating grants willy-nilly, but Florida is a special case. Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has encouraged the termination of grants to his own state universities, saying: "The Trump administration is working hard to get some of the rot out of higher education, the intellectual rot, the ideological rot."
Among other grants terminated is one to the University of South Florida that was designed to bring life-changing improvements to an underserved (minority) neighborhood of 10,000 people near Tampa. Another was helping to restore clean water service to 50 multifamily complexes whose well water and septic systems were polluted by Hurricane Milton. In the private sector, when party A contracts with party B to provide some service, the contract cannot just be unilaterally canceled if party A gets a new CEO who doesn't like the service as long as B is providing the contracted service. With government, it doesn't work like that. The government is actually allowed to terminate contracts at any time, but has to have a valid justification. There are going to be courts working overtime for the next several years to determine if that is the case here. (V)