By Andy Rose and Taylor Romine

(CNN) — President Donald Trump says Harvard University will be stripped of its tax-exempt status — redoubling an extraordinary threat that the Ivy League school’s president is pushing back against.

“We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!” Trump posted Friday morning on Truth Social.

In response, Harvard University President Alan Garber fired back in an interview with The Wall Street Journal Friday, saying the action would be “highly illegal” and “destructive” to the university.

Trump floated a trial balloon April 15 for the notion of removing Harvard’s tax-exempt status, and the Internal Revenue Service had been making plans to carry out the idea amid a broader chess match over free speech, political ideology and federal funding at the Ivy League school and across American academia.

Garber told the Journal it would be “highly illegal unless there is some reasoning that we have not been exposed to that would justify this dramatic move.” He added that Harvard’s education and research would be “severely impaired.”

“The message that it sends to the educational community would be a very dire one, which suggests that political disagreements could be used as a basis to pose what might be an existential threat to so many educational institutions,” Garber said to the Journal.

Money for federal taxes would have to be taken away from other priorities and “would result in diminished financial aid for students, abandonment of critical medical research programs, and lost opportunities for innovation,” a Harvard spokesperson told CNN Friday.

US law specifically prohibits presidents from directing the IRS to investigate anyone. If it found Harvard’s tax-exempt status should be revoked, the agency would have to formally notify and give the school a chance to challenge the decision. The IRS did not immediately respond to CNN’s questions about how Trump’s announcement might be implemented.

Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts said Friday that Trump’s actions are an attempt to force Harvard to comply with his ideology and described the move as unconstitutional. He added the disruption caused by Trump’s threats has had a negative impact on life-saving research and people’s livelihoods.

“I stand by Harvard in its fight against authoritarianism. I stand with Harvard in their demand for due process,” he said. “I stand with Harvard against the overreach of the Trump administration to try to intimidate and bully not only Harvard but universities all across our nation.”

Trump’s online post came on the same day his administration released a spending proposal to Congress that would cut nearly $2.5 billion from the IRS budget. In addition, the “President’s Budget restores IRS as a neutral arbiter that will no longer use weaponized enforcement and overzealous rules against the American people,” the White House said in talking points accompanying the budget.

Revoking the tax-exempt status of an institution of higher education is extremely rare. The IRS took that step in 1970 against Bob Jones University because the school did not allow interracial relationships among students, a decision upheld years later by the Supreme Court. The university rescinded its interracial dating policy in 2000, and its tax exemption was restored in 2017.

Harvard has emerged as the Trump administration’s most high-profile foe after the White House’s Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism last month announced a freeze of more than $2 billion in its federal research funding. The university sued for release of the money, with a resolution unlikely until midsummer at the soonest.

The Trump administration also has threatened to revoke the university’s ability to host international students if it doesn’t submit to a long list of demands, including: eliminating its diversity, equity and inclusion programs, banning masks at campus protests, enacting merit-based hiring and admissions changes, turning over foreign students’ discipline records, and reducing the power held by faculty and administrators who are “more committed to activism than scholarship.”

Harvard “will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” its president has said. “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government.”

While the White House has said its aim is a crackdown on antisemitism following protests across US campuses over the war in Gaza, scholars and prominent Jewish organizations have expressed concern with its far-reaching attacks on Harvard.

Harvard in recent days has taken some symbolic steps toward the Trump administration’s ultimatums, renaming its Office for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging as Community and Campus Life and reportedly cutting off resources for affinity group celebrations during commencement.

And Harvard this week released two lengthy internal reports, one on how antisemitism and anti-Israel bias is handled on campus and another on anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias. While school officials don’t entirely disagree with the White House’s position that antisemitism is a major problem at the university, that report shows, the sides still strongly disagree over who should decide what reforms are required and whether federal or school officials should oversee them.

The university also shared data with the Department of Homeland Security in response to its request for information on the illegal activity and disciplinary records of international students, though it did not detail what it gave.

Harvard’s steps so far to curb antisemitism are “positive,” a White House official told CNN this week, but “what we’re seeing is not enough, and there’s actually probably going to be additional funding being cut.”

This story has been updated with additional information.

The-CNN-Wire
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