Cornell Pays $60 Million to Restore Frozen Research Funding

On November 7, 2025, Cornell University announced a $60 million settlement with the Trump administration to restore roughly $250 million in federal research funding that had been frozen since April 2025 over alleged civil-rights violations tied to campus antisemitism. Under the deal, $30 million will fund U.S. agriculture research and $30 million goes directly to the federal government to end pending claims; the agreement states Cornell admits no wrongdoing.

The settlement followed a broader administration campaign that froze federal research money at several elite universities, disproportionately affecting climate, public health, and social-policy research. Cornell became one of the largest institutions to reach such a deal.

Faculty and some administrators described the arrangement as resembling a forced payment to unfreeze money Congress had already appropriated through competitive peer review, warning it sets a precedent for conditioning federal research dollars on financial concessions to the executive branch rather than neutral legal or scientific criteria.