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Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and three other Democratic senators are urging the IRS’s watchdog to investigate whether the Trump administration is illegally pressuring the agency to strip Harvard of its tax exemption.
The request from Schumer and Sens. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) was first reported by POLITICO less than two hours before President Donald Trump announced he would proceed with revoking Harvard's exemption.
"We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status. It’s what they deserve!" he wrote on Truth Social.
Ahead of the announcement, the Democrats noted that Trump had openly called into question Harvard's tax exemption — delivering the kind of pressure, they said, that runs afoul of post-Watergate laws that make it illegal for government officials to push the IRS to audit or investigate individual taxpayers.
The senators wrote to Treasury's acting inspector general for tax administration that it’s “unconscionable that the IRS would become a weapon of the Trump Administration to extort its perceived enemies, but the actions of the President and his operatives have now made this fear a reality.”
In addition to asking for an investigation into the Harvard threats, Democrats want the watchdog to hand over information about whether the IRS has faced pressure from Trump or other administration officials to revoke the tax exempt status of other institutions besides Harvard.
Trump has criticized elite schools for a variety of reasons, including not doing more to rein in antisemitism and for their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.
The president specifically asked on social media last month whether Harvard “should lose its Tax Exempt Status and be Taxed as a Political Entity.”
The IRS reportedly started looking into that possibility shortly thereafter, though the White House has said that the president wouldn’t play any role in any investigation from the tax agency into Harvard.
Investigations into a nonprofit’s tax exemption frequently take years, and Schumer and the other senators noted that Harvard had the resources to fight back against just such a challenge.
But the Democrats also worried that smaller nonprofits would be much more vulnerable if they found themselves in the same situation.
“Church groups, hospitals, health clinics, or food banks could be next,” Schumer, Markey, Warren and Wyden wrote. “If the President is able to successfully target Harvard’s tax-exemption, anyone could be next.”
Jordain Carney contributed to this report.
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