An article from Dive Brief University of Pennsylvania ordered to stop work on $175M in federal contracts

The Trump administration pulled research funding over the president’s rule on transgender athletes — even though the university says it is complying.

Published March 26, 2025 Ben Unglesbee Senior Reporter

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University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The university has become a target of the Trump administration following an executive order banning transgender women from college sports teams aligning with their gender identity. Permission granted by University of Pennsylvania Listen to the article 4 min This audio is auto-generated. Please let us know if you have feedback.

Faculty in seven schools at the University of Pennsylvania received stop-work orders from Trump administration agencies on federally contracted research last week, the Ivy League institution said Tuesday.

The affected research totals some $175 million in contracts, matching the amount of Penn’s federal funding that the Trump administration suspended last week over the university’s athletics participation policies for transgender students.

The institution's athletic policies currently meet the NCAA’s participation requirement, university President Larry Jameson said in a message to the campus community. Those rules changed in February following President Donald Trump’s executive order banning transgender women from playing on college or K-12 sports teams aligning with their gender identity. 

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The day after Trump’s Feb. 5 order, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights opened an investigation into Penn under Title IX law, which prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded education institutions. 

The university has been a focus in debates over gender identity and college athletics for some time, since former college swimmer Lia Thomas began competing for Penn. The scrutiny intensified in 2022 when Thomas became the first openly transgender woman to win a NCAA Division I championship for her victory in the women’s 500-yard freestyle. 

At that time, NCAA rules allowed transgender athletes to participate on teams aligning with their gender identity if they met specific criteria. 

In its response to OCR, Penn said it had "followed NCAA rules and applicable law as they existed then, and that we now comply with the NCAA policy and the law as they exist today,” Jameson said Tuesday. “We expect to continue to engage with OCR, vigorously defending our position.”

The University of Maine System was also — briefly — financially targeted by the government over Trump’s order. Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Agriculture moved to halt its funding to the university system. This followed a February announcement that the USDA was opening a Title IX compliance review into UMS, a day after a heated public exchange between Trump and Maine Gov. Janet Mills over his executive order on transgender athletes. 

Like Penn, UMS said its athletics participation policies comply with the NCAA’s changed rules. Shortly after USDA’s funding freeze on UMS became public, and after discussions between Trump officials and Maine Sen. Susan Collins, the agency restored the system’s funding. USDA acknowledged the system’s compliance later in March.

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The recently stopped federal contracts at Penn were tied to research for “preventing hospital-acquired infections, drug screening against deadly viruses, quantum computing, protections against chemical warfare, and student loan programs,” Jameson said. 

The new stoppages came in addition to “several federal grants” that have been recently canceled and others that have been slowed going forward, according to Jameson.

“We are actively pursuing multiple avenues to understand and address these funding terminations, freezes, and slowdowns,” he added. 

This week Penn’s healthcare system announced 300 job cuts, about a third of which were vacant or held by employees set to retire, according to media reports. The system’s chief operating officer told the Daily Pennsylvanian, the university’s student paper, that the cuts were part of a broader organizational restructuring to shore up its financial footing and were not tied to the Trump administration's actions on grants and contracts.

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