A demonstrator holds a sign after a rally against U.S. President Donald Trump’s attacks on Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts on April 17, 2025. (Photo: Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)
“Indiscriminately slashing medical, scientific, and technological research undermines the nation’s ability to save American lives, foster American success, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”
Harvard University sued multiple federal agencies and members of U.S. President Donald Trump’s Cabinet on Monday over a $2.2 billion funding “freeze” and reported plans to cut off another $1 billion, implemented in response to the nation’s oldest higher education institution rejecting the administration’s escalating demands.
In addition to the funding cuts, the Trump administration has “initiated numerous investigations of Harvard’s operations, threatened the education of international students, and announced that it is considering a revocation of Harvard’s 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status,” said Alan Garber, the university’s president, in a statement. “These actions have stark real-life consequences for patients, students, faculty, staff, researchers, and the standing of American higher education in the world.”
“Research that the government has put in jeopardy includes efforts to improve the prospects of children who survive cancer.”
“The consequences of the government’s overreach will be severe and long-lasting,” Garber explained. “Research that the government has put in jeopardy includes efforts to improve the prospects of children who survive cancer, to understand at the molecular level how cancer spreads throughout the body, to predict the spread of infectious disease outbreaks, and to ease the pain of soldiers wounded on the battlefield.”
“As opportunities to reduce the risk of multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease are on the horizon, the government is slamming on the brakes,” he continued. “The victims will be future patients and their loved ones who will suffer the heartbreak of illnesses that might have been prevented or treated more effectively. Indiscriminately slashing medical, scientific, and technological research undermines the nation’s ability to save American lives, foster American success, and maintain America’s position as a global leader in innovation.”
Noting the Trump administration’s attempt to justify funding cuts by citing Harvard’s response to discrimiation against Jewish people, Garber said that “as a Jew and as an American, I know very well that there are valid concerns about rising antisemitism,” and pledged to “fight hate with the urgency it demands as we fully comply with our obligations under the law.” He also promised to soon release task force reports about combating antisemitism and Islamophobia on campus.
Right on. Give them no quarter. They’re attempting to destroy Harvard. https://t.co/JZ36PeRoXz
The university president’s lengthy message included a link to the 51-page complaint, filed in a federal court in Boston, Massachusetts. The defendants are the General Services Administration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and the departments of Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, and Justice, along with the leaders of those agencies.
Like Garber’s statement, the complaint highlights the sweeping impacts of “the government’s efforts to use the withholding of federal funding as leverage to gain control of academic decision-making at Harvard” and other higher education institutions.
“Defendants’ actions threaten Harvard’s academic independence and place at risk critical lifesaving and pathbreaking research that occurs on its campus,” the filing states. “And they are part of a broader effort by the government to punish Harvard for protecting its constitutional rights.”
“The government’s actions flout not just the First Amendment, but also federal laws and regulations,” the complaint argues, asking the court “to enjoin defendants from exceeding the bounds of their legal authority and to protect Harvard’s constitutional rights.”
The Harvard Crimson, the campus newspaper, noted that the university “will be represented by Robert K. Hur ’95 and William A. Burck, both lawyers with deep ties to President Donald Trump. Hur was appointed to the United States Department of Justice by Trump in his first term, and Burck has served as counsel for the Trump Organization. Lawyers affiliated with law firms Ropes & Gray and Lehtosky Keller Cohn will also represent Harvard, according to the lawsuit.”
The Ivy League university’s suit was filed the same day that a coalition of 75 groups, led by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, responded to Trump’s attacks on nonprofits by launching “The Pact: A Civil Rights Coalition Unity Commitment.”
“We have witnessed outrageous attacks on our work,” the coalition’s pact states, citing investigations of nonprofits, terminated grants, law firms fearing retribution, threats to revoke tax-exempt status, and the weaponization of civil rights laws. “We will not be divided. We will not be intimidated into silence or abandoning our communities.”
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Climate activists and supporters displayed placards during a global climate strike rally, part of the Fridays for Future movement, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 11, 2025. (Photo: Mamunur Rashid/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
“If, in fact, a majority of people in your community care about climate change, and yet elected officials aren’t responding to that, that’s a deficit in democracy,” one of the project’s organizers said.
According to a global survey, 89% of people worldwide want their government to do more to address the climate crisis, yet current national policies put the world on track for 3.1°C of warming.
To explore this disconnect, Covering Climate Now (CCNow) launched the 89% Project on Monday to encourage coverage of “climate change’s silent majority” and ask some key questions.
“If, in fact, a majority of people in your community care about climate change, and yet elected officials aren’t responding to that, that’s a deficit in democracy,” CCNow co-founder Kyle Pope told Common Dreams. “Why is that? What’s to be done about it? Where do we go from here?”
‘A Media Problem’
The 89% Project is designed as a yearlong initiative that kicks off with a joint week of coverage coinciding with Earth Day. Another week of coverage will take place in the fall in the leadup to the United Nations climate conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil. In between, CCNow will host webinars and gatherings, promote the project on social media, and analyze the coverage to see what newsrooms are focusing on and what support they may need to continue telling climate stories going forward.
Already, major media outlets have signed on to participate, with The Guardian and Agence France-Presse acting as lead partners. Other core partners include The Nation, Rolling Stone, Scientific American, TIME, Canada’s National Observer, Germany’s Deutsche Welle, Italy’s Corriere della Sera, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, and Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism. However, media outlets don’t need to sign up ahead of time in order to participate. They simply need to publish a story related to the 89% theme during the coverage week, include a logo and tagline with their article, and email their coverage to editors@coveringclimatenow.org.
CCNow encourages stories “focused on the people who comprise the 89%: Who are they? How do their numbers vary across countries, genders, and ages? What kinds of climate action do they want governments to take, and what are the main obstacles to such action?” its website explains.
“It’s also for newsrooms to internalize and newsrooms to say, OK, our audience really cares about this. We can’t silo it. We can’t get distracted by other things.”
The project builds on the work CCNow has been doing since it first broke onto the scene five years ago with a week of climate-focused coverage in September 2019 that generated some 3,400 pieces from over 300 partners. CCNow’s emergence coincided with the apex of Greta Thunberg’s Fridays for Future school strike movement and a growing awareness globally of the climate crisis and its stakes.
In the five years since, Pope said there has been a decline in outright “climate silence” from newsrooms, as well as “both-sidsing” the issue despite an overwhelming scientific consensus that the Earth is heating due to human activity. However, he has noticed a persistent pattern of “leaving climate out of stories where it should be.” For example, the bulk of coverage of January’s catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires did not mention climate.
The impetus for the 89% Project grew partly from frustration over hearing the same refrain from newsrooms.
“They kept telling us, oh, well, this is a topic that’s really divisive. This is a topic that most people want to avoid. This is a topic that is very politically split. And then when we looked at data, surveys from all over the world, we kept seeing that that wasn’t true, that in fact, a majority of the people on the planet care about this,” he told Common Dreams.
The project was also inspired by a “confluence” of studies that emerged in 2024 finding that an “overwhelming majority” of people worldwide wanted climate action. These included the study that the 89% figure is drawn from, which was published in Nature Climate Change in February of 2024 and was based off of a Global Climate Change Survey included in the 2021-22 Gallup World Poll, which was administered to 129,902 people in 125 countries.
Another example CCNow held up was a U.S.-based survey, published in late January by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication and George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication and conducted after the November 2024 election, which found that more than 70% of registered U.S. voters favored climate policies such as regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant, staying in the Paris agreement, and increasing solar and wind energy.
CCNow first began to discuss the 89% Project in the fall of 2024 and announced it publicly in late January.
The primary goal, according to Pope, is to encourage the mainstream newsrooms to change their thinking around whether or not their audience wants to hear climate stories.
“Our orientation is, we look at everything from a media point of view, and we sort of saw it as a media problem,” Pope said.
He hopes newsrooms will learn the importance of maintaining climate coverage even as other breaking stories demand their attention.
“It’s also for newsrooms to internalize and newsrooms to say, OK, our audience really cares about this. We can’t silo it. We can’t get distracted by other things,” he explained.
Pluralistic Ignorance
While the 89% Project is aimed at convincing media organizations that their audiences want climate coverage, another goal is to make those audiences aware of each other.
“One of the really remarkable things about this polling is the 89% doesn’t think they’re in the majority,” Pope said. “They think that their concern about climate makes them an outlier. That’s not true. You’re not an outlier. You’re just like most people in your community.”
For example, the 89% study also found that 69% of people would be willing to give 1% of their monthly household income to help combat climate change, yet they only thought 43% of their fellow citizens would be willing to do the same.
“Almost everybody dramatically underestimates the level of concern and support for action on climate change.”
Anthony Leiserowitz, who directs the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, told Common Dreams that the academic term for this is “pluralistic ignorance.”
“It basically refers to the fact that most of us don’t know what’s in other people’s heads,” he said, whether this is family members, strangers we’ve just met, or the larger groups of people with whom we share a country and planet.
“What we see consistently,” he continued, “and this is true across the board, of the general public as well as people in Congress, and news editors, and corporate leaders, and on and on, is that almost everybody dramatically underestimates the level of concern and support for action on climate change.”
What the 89% Project has the chance to do, Leiserowitz said, “‘is to actually help hold a mirror up to society and help them see themselves.”
In a way, the project is fulfilling a hope laid out by the paper’s authors.
“Importantly, these systematic perception gaps can form an obstacle to climate action,” the study authors wrote. “The prevailing pessimism regarding others’ support for climate action can deter individuals from engaging in climate action, thereby confirming the negative beliefs held by others. Therefore, our results suggest a potentially powerful intervention, that is, a concerted political and communicative effort to correct these misperceptions.”
And Leiserowitz said he thought it was important that the media step up to make this effort.
“The media is one of the primary ways that anybody who knows about, learns about, becomes engaged with this issue,” he said. “Most people are not going out and reading the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report on their own or conducting climate science experiments in their backyard. That’s not how they’re going to learn about it.”
Therefore, he said, CCNow’s effort to “really encourage and build a community of practice around reporting on climate change is super, super important. The world cannot deal with this issue unless we’re talking about it.”
Democracy Deficit
Another potential consequence of making the 89% aware of each other is making them aware of the extent to which their political leaders are failing to represent them.
Pope anticipated the coverage might prompt readers to think: “Maybe we should all start questioning our elected officials more. Why aren’t you taking climate into account? If we all believe in this, why aren’t you doing this?”
The 89% Project is global in scope—and Pope said it was not motivated by the victory of climate-denying President Donald Trump in the November 2024 U.S. election.
“Americans have been growing increasingly concerned and even alarmed about climate change over the past decade. So nobody was voting for this.”
However, Pope said, the project did become “more urgent as this new administration has taken a hold and has really gone on the attack on climate policy.”
One thing coverage may bring out is the gap between U.S. public opinion and Trump actions such as withdrawing from the Paris agreement, declaring an energy emergency to encourage more oil and gas drilling, gutting environmental regulations, and defunding climate science.
Pointing to Yale’s post-election survey cited by CCNow, Leiserowitz said, “This is not what people want.”
“It’s pretty clear this election was not a referendum on climate change,” he added. “Americans have been growing increasingly concerned and even alarmed about climate change over the past decade. So nobody was voting for this.”
While Pope acknowledged that “U.S. politics right now toward climate are particularly odious,” about half CCNow’s collaborators are based in other countries, and they also report a false assumption that climate action is more controversial than the data suggests.
“This general idea that this is a divisive issue, that it’s a hot-button topic, that it’s something that our audience finds political, those themes you see over and over again,” he said.
In the U.S. under Trump, but in other countries as well, the democracy deficit between public opinion and government action goes hand-in-hand with a government attack on democratic freedoms to call for climate action. Trump has also targeted members of the press for their reporting decisions, such as banningThe Associated Press from White House briefings over its refusal to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America in its style guide.
Pope said that running joint coverage weeks was a good way to encourage newsroom collaboration amid tight resources. Could there also be safety in numbers against government repression?
Pope said that a unified front was harder to attack, though he noted that climate journalists have faced threats and social media trolling for years, and that the Trump administration was likely to continue those attacks regardless. However, he urged against panic.
“I think one of the reasons that the 89% framing is appealing to us is it’s not a fear-based idea,” he said. “In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s like we’re all in this together, and a lot of us, not just people in the climate movement, not just people who work in this area, but a lot of just our neighbors really care about this. So let’s not cower.”
This story is part of The 89 Percent Project, an initiative of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
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The Trump administration maintains that it can send people to overseas concentration camps with impunity because “activist judges do not have the jurisdiction to seize control of the president’s authority to conduct foreign policy” (BBC, 4/11/25).
As the Trump administration openly defies court orders to return a man wrongfully deported to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, some American outlets are underplaying the significance of this constitutional crisis.
In a unanimous decision the Supreme Court “declined to block a lower court’s order to ‘facilitate’ bringing back Kilmar Ábrego García,” a Salvadoran who had legal protections in the United States and was wrongfully sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, or CECOT (BBC, 4/11/25).
The White House is not complying (Democracy Docket, 4/14/25). “The federal courts have no authority to direct the executive branch to conduct foreign relations in a particular way, or engage with a foreign sovereign in a given manner,” Trump’s Justice Department insists (CNN, 4/15/25). Fox News (4/16/25) said of Attorney General Pam Bondi: “Bondi Defiant, Says Ábrego García Will Stay in El Salvador ‘End of the Story.’”
In an X post (4/15/25) filled with unproven assertions that skirt the question of due process and extraordinary rendition, Vice President J.D. Vance said, “The entire American media and left-wing industrial complex has decided the most important issue today is that the Trump admin deported an MS-13 gang member (and illegal alien).” (Are we supposed to believe that the six conservatives on the Supreme Court, three of whom were appointed by Trump, are a part of the “left-wing industrial complex?”)
The complete disregard to constitutional protections of due process and to court orders should send alarm bells throughout American society. The MAGA movement condones sending unconvicted migrants to a foreign hellhole largely on grounds that they are not US citizens, and thus don’t have a right to constitutional due process. But the administration has floated the idea of doing the same thing to “homegrown” undesirables as well (Al Jazeera, 4/15/25).
‘An uncertain end’
The New York Times (4/15/25) goes out on a limb and declares that the president defying the Supreme Court is “a path with an uncertain end.”
The case is quite obviously not about the extremity or unpopularity of President Donald Trump’s policies, but a breaking point at which the executive branch has left the democratic confines of the Constitution, as many journalists and scholars have warned about. But the case is not necessarily being portrayed that way in the establishment press.
In an article about the Trump administration’s record of resisting court orders, a New York Times subhead (4/15/25) read, “Scholars say that the Trump administration is now flirting with lawless defiance of court orders, a path with an uncertain end.” In an article about “What to Know About the Mistaken Deportation of a Maryland Man to El Salvador” (4/14/25), reporter Alan Feuer described the Supreme Court’s upholding the order to “facilitate” the return of Ábrego García as “complicated and rather ambiguous” rather than a “clear victory for the administration.”
At the Washington Post (4/14/25), law professor Stuart Banner wrote an opinion piece saying that fears of a constitutional crisis were overblown, noting that while Trump is “famous for his contemptuous remarks about judges…tension between the president and the Supreme Court is centuries old.” Thus, he said, there are incentives in both branches to “not to let conflict ripen into public defiance.”
The Wall Street Journal (4/15/25) presents the prospect of the White House defying a Supreme Court order as a “showdown” that Trump might “win.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial board (4/15/25) said:
Mr. Trump would be wise to settle all of this by quietly asking Mr. Bukele to return Mr. Ábrego García, who has a family in the US. But the president may be bloody-minded enough that he wants to show the judiciary who’s boss. If this case does become a judicial showdown, Mr. Trump may assert his Article II powers not to return Mr. Ábrego García, and the Supreme Court will be reluctant to disagree.
But Mr. Trump would be smarter to play the long game. He has many, much bigger issues than the fate of one man that will come before the Supreme Court. By taunting the judiciary in this manner, he is inviting a rebuke on cases that carry far greater stakes.
These articles display a naivete about the current moment. The Trump administration and its allies have flatly declared that they believe a judicial check on the executive authority wrongly places constitutional restraints on Trump’s desires (New York Times, 3/19/25; Guardian, 3/22/25).
House Speaker Mike Johnson, responding to court rulings that went against MAGA desires, “warned that Congress’ authority over the federal judiciary includes the power to eliminate entire district courts,” Reuters (3/25/25) reported. The House also approved legislation, along party lines, that “limits the authority of federal district judges to issue nationwide orders, as Republicans react to several court rulings against the Trump administration” (AP, 4/9/25).
In other words, Trump’s defiance of the courts is part of a broader campaign to assert that the Constitution simply should not be an impediment to his rule. That’s not a liberal versus conservative debate about national policy, but a declaration that the United States will no longer operate as a constitutional republic.
‘Constitutional crisis is here’
“Think long and hard about what it means to have a president who gleefully ignores the courts,” urges Rex Huppke (USA Today, 4/15/25). “It’s time to stand up and shout ‘Hell no!’ right freakin’ now, and not a moment later.”
Pieces like the ones at the Journal, Times and Post give readers the sense that this affair is just another quirk of the American system of checks and balances, when, in fact, history could look back and declare this the moment when the Constitution became a dead letter.
Other outlets, however, appeared to appreciate the gravity of the situation. “America Is Dangerously Close to Being Run by a King Who Answers to No One” was the headline of Rex Huppke column at USA Today (4/15/25). “The Constitutional Crisis Is Here” was the headline of a recent piece by Adam Serwer at the Atlantic (4/14/25).
This case will roil on, and both the judicial system (Reuters, 4/15/25) and congressmembers (NBC News, 4/16/25) are taking action. There’s still time for the papers to treat this case with the urgency that it deserves.
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A marcher holds a sign that says, “Not My Dictator” with a picture of Donald Trump in front of Trump International Tower during the Woman’s March in the borough of Manhattan in New York on January 18, 2020. (Photo: Ira L. Black/Corbis via Getty Images)
…
April 20 is the deadline Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Homeland Security Agency head Kristi Noem have for submitting a joint report to President Donald Trump about conditions at the southern border, along with their recommendations for invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 and the National Emergencies Act of 1976.
If any of this comes to pass, it won’t just be undocumented migrants, foreign students, asylum-seekers, and suspected gang members who end up in the crosshairs.
…
Originally adopted in 1792 as the “Calling Forth Act,” the Insurrection Act on the books today authorizes the president to deploy the Army and deputize the National Guard to suppress insurrections, rebellions, instances of civil disorder, and unlawful “combinations or assemblages” that obstruct the authority of the United States or the ability of any state to enforce the law.
Detainees are transferred from buses operated by the GEO Group to a plane chartered by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at King County International Airport on April 15, 2025 in Seattle, Washington. (Photo: David Ryder/Getty Images)
A U.S. Department of Justice lawyer told a federal judge that there are no plans for such flights on Friday or Saturday while still asserting the administration’s “right to remove people” as early as this weekend.
The ACLU on Friday sought emergency action from the U.S. Supreme Court to protect Venezuelan men in immigration custody at risk of swiftly being deported under President Donald Trump’s proclamation invoking an 18th-century wartime law.
The high court should “preserve the status quo for individuals challenging their removal under the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas,” according to the legal group. “Members of the proposed class are in imminent and ongoing jeopardy of being removed from the United States without notice or an opportunity to be heard, in direct contravention of this court’s order,” which came after Trump used the 1798 law to send Venezuelans to a mega-prison in El Salvador last month.
The administration sent two planeloads of alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua to the Salvadoran Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), despite Washington, D.C.-based District Court Judge James Boasberg blocking deportations under the AEA. The Supreme Court lifted that block earlier this month, but also said people targeted for deportation should first receive notices—though no timeline was mandated—and be able to challenge their removal in court.
The ACLU’s Friday filing followed Venezuelan migrants at Bluebonnet Detention Facility in Anson, Texas receiving removal notices. The petition—which goes to Justice Samuel Alito—states that “many individuals have already been loaded on to buses, presumably headed to the airport,” and cites reporting that the administration was preparing for an imminent military deportation flight.
“Because of this ongoing and imminent risk of removal to a prison in El Salvador, applicants are simultaneously seeking relief through a renewed application for a temporary restraining order in the district court in the District of Columbia and an application for a stay of removal in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit,” the filing noted.
Boasberg, the district court judge, called an emergency hearing on Friday evening. Politico‘s Josh Gerstein reported that U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney Drew Ensign told him that there would be no AEA deportation flights on Friday night, and people he spoke with were not aware of any scheduled for Saturday.
According to Camilo Montoya-Galvez at CBS News, Boasberg also took issue with the notice that immigration officials gave to the targeted migrants, a photo of which the reporter shared on social media.
Montoya-Galvez later reported that after a recess, the DOJ lawyer clarified to Boasberg that while he has been informed by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security that there are no plans for AEA deportations on Saturday, they “reserve the right to remove people tomorrow.”
Earlier this week, Boasberg concluded that the Trump administration’s decisions related to migrants sent to CECOT in March “demonstrate a willful disregard for [his] order, sufficient for the court to conclude that probable cause exists to find the government in criminal contempt.”
On Friday evening, a panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. issued an administrative stay, halting the district court judge’s plan for contempt proceedings.
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