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(WASHINGTON) — President Donald Trump’s administration is launching an investigation into Harvard University’s law journal over alleged discriminatory practices, expanding its weeks-long battle over federal funding with the elite institution.

The civil rights offices of the Education and Health and Human Services departments announced Monday they are investigating the Harvard Law Review, an independent, student-run organization that promotes legal scholarship.

The offices are investigating allegations that the journal discriminates based on race “in lieu of merit-based” standards, in violation of the Title VI anti-discrimination law, according to a release by the two agencies.

“Harvard Law Review’s article selection process appears to pick winners and losers on the basis of race, employing a spoils system in which the race of the legal scholar is as, if not more, important than the merit of the submission,” Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary within the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights, said in a statement on Monday.

The agencies said the Harvard Law Review risks losing federal funding if found to have broken Title VI law.

The Harvard Law Review has been published and edited by students for over 135 years. It aims to be an effective research tool for practicing lawyers and students, according to its website.

“Harvard Law School is committed to ensuring that the programs and activities it oversees are in compliance with all applicable laws and to investigating any credibly alleged violations,” a spokesperson for the university said in a statement to ABC News, noting that the journal “is a student-run organization that is legally independent from the law school.”

The latest investigation comes after the Trump administration froze over $2.2 billion in federal funding to Harvard after the university refused to comply with a series of demands following an antisemitism task force review earlier this month.

Harvard University President Alan Garber said in a letter at the time that “no government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.”

The university has filed a lawsuit over the Trump administration’s threats to withhold funding, asking a judge to block the funding freeze from going into effect, arguing the move is “unlawful and beyond the government’s authority.”

During a short conference on Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Allison Burroughs scheduled oral arguments in the lawsuit challenging the funding freeze on July 21. In the meantime, the funding freeze will remain in effect.

The Internal Revenue Service is also considering revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status, sources told ABC News earlier this month.

In other developments, the Department of Education said Monday its civil rights office found that the University of Pennsylvania violated Title IX by allowing transgender athletes to compete on its women’s sports teams.

The department is demanding the university issue a statement to its community that it will comply with the law, apologize to athletes whose athletic participation was “marred by sex discrimination,” and restore all athletics records or accolades “misappropriated by male athletes.” The school has 10 days to resolve the violation or risk a referral to the Department of Justice.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration said it suspended $175 million in federal contracts awarded to Penn, citing the participation of a transgender athlete on a women’s swimming team.

A Penn spokesperson said at the time that the university has “always followed” NCAA and Ivy League policies regarding student participation on athletic teams.

ABC News’ Peter Charalambous contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — House Speaker Mike Johnson met with President Donald Trump Monday afternoon in the Oval Office, where they huddled over the GOP’s political strategy heading into a pivotal period of legislative business — with their congressional majorities on the line.

As Congress returns to Washington following a two-week recess and the president approaches 100 days in office, Republicans hope to sharply reshape federal spending to align with the president’s domestic agenda.

After meeting with the president, Johnson returned to the Capitol to meet with top administration officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and leading congressional Republicans grappling over budget reconciliation.

“We’re working on the big, beautiful bill, the reconciliation bill,” Johnson told reporters. “Now is game time as the big developments will be coming together. We’re excited about that. I think it’s going to be a great piece of legislation.”

Flanked by White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett and James Blair, assistant to the president, Bessent told reporters after the meeting on Monday that he found “great unity” among congressional Republican leaders, with the House and Senate moving quickly and “in lockstep” on a budget bill focused on Trump’s priorities.

The meeting included Senate Majority Leader John Thune, Johnson, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Mike Crapo and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Jason Smith.

“We think that they are in a substantial agreement, and that this is going to be a win for the American people. Very-pro growth,” Bessent continued.

He said there were “three legs” to the president’s economic agenda: trade, tax and deregulation. He said they hoped to get the tax portion of the budget package done by July 4.

“Both sides have proposals in front of the President, and we think there’s a path to deliver the requisite spending reforms to get a great pro-growth tax package, along with the president’s priorities that he laid out on the campaign trail,” Bessent said.

Hassett reiterated Trump’s claim that a billionaire tax cut is off the table. Bessent said priorities for the package would be to make tax cuts and the Jobs Act permanent, no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, no tax on overtime, and deductibility for loans for American-made cars.

Asked if Bessent’s July 4 timeline was realistic, Thune said, “I think so. You know, I mean, it’s, it all depends on how progress goes in the next few weeks.”

“I think we, everybody, feels like we’re making significant progress in trying to get the House, the Senate and the White House, kind of in the same place. But it’s going to take time. It’s complicated — a lot of moving parts,” Thune said.

Republicans have begun releasing legislative text to codify their lofty ambitions to cut at least $2 trillion from federal spending over the next decade, with six markups scheduled this week and additional hearings anticipated in the coming weeks as conservatives face the latest test of their narrow majority.

“It’s going to solve a lot of problems,” Johnson predicted. “It’s going to be a turbo-boost for the economy, and we’re looking forward to getting that done.”

But as Trump reaches his 100th day in office this week, polling shows the public souring on the president’s job performance. Nevertheless, Johnson maintains the belief that the GOP is poised to defend its narrow majority — claiming Republicans “are playing offense.”

“We talked about the upcoming races, the midterm elections and we’re very bullish on it,” Johnson proclaimed. “There’s 13 Democrats sitting in districts that President Trump won. Those are the obvious targets. We have an offensive map. There’s only three House Republicans sitting in districts that Kamala Harris won. So it’s a lopsided map, it gives us a great opportunity and we’re going to go make history.”

Still, Johnson acknowledged there have been some ups and downs in the early stages of the administration.

“These presidential terms are roller-coaster sometimes. There’s been a little tumult in the markets with the tariff policy and all of that, but I think this is settling out,” Johnson said. “People are in very good spirits. They understand that this is a long game to be played.”

ABC News’ Isabella Murray contributed to this report.

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(WASHINGTON) — The Justice Department’s division tasked with enforcing the nation’s federal civil rights laws has recently seen a mass exodus of “over 100” attorneys, the newly confirmed official leading the division said in an interview this week.

“What we have made very clear last week in memos to each of the 11 sections in the Civil Rights Division is that our priorities under President Trump are going to be somewhat different than they were under President Biden,” DOJ Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon said in an interview with conservative host Glenn Beck. “And then we tell them, these are the President’s priorities, this is what we will be focusing on — you know, govern yourself accordingly. And en masse, dozens and now over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do.”

The resignations come as Dhillon and Attorney General Pam Bondi have made clear the priorities of the division — which was established in the wake of the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s — would shift away from priorities like enforcing voting rights laws and cracking down on unconstitutional policing to culture war issues touted by President Trump in his 2024 campaign.

In recent weeks, the department has said it would pursue legal action against states that permit transgender athletes to participate in girls’ and women’s sports, withdrawn from a Biden-era lawsuit against Georgia’s voting laws and convened a task force to investigate incidents of “anti-Christian bias.”

Of the recent resignations, Dhillon said in the interview that she thinks it’s “fine” the attorneys opted to leave.

“We don’t want people in the federal government who feel like it’s their pet project to go persecute, you know, police departments based on statistical evidence or persecute people praying outside abortion facilities instead of doing violence,” Dhillon said. “That’s not the job here. The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology.”

At the same time, Dhillon said in the interview she was seeking to staff up the division so they could pursue issues like the administration’s actions targeting Harvard University.

“You need more lawyers, investigators and commitment to do the work, and you need the people in the United States identifying these things for us,” Dhillon said. “We’re going to run out of attorneys to work on these things at some point.”

Several top Democrats sent a letter to Bondi, Dhillon and DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz Monday raising concerns over what they described as the “politicization” of the DOJ’s civil rights division.

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