Donald Trump’s unprecedented offensive against Harvard University includes three key elements. One involves targeting Harvard’s tax-exempt status, and according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, those efforts are currently “moving forward,” despite legal restrictions that appear to make such a move illegal.

Another part of this political attack is the administration’s plan to block Harvard from enrolling international students, a gambit that’s already struggling in the courts.

But perhaps most important of all is the White House’s lengthy and aggressive efforts to deny the university federal grants. As The New York Times reported, this component of the broader political war is poised to take a dramatic step forward.

The Trump administration is set to cancel the federal government’s remaining federal contracts with Harvard University — worth an estimated $100 million, according to a letter that is being sent to federal agencies on Tuesday. The letter also instructs agencies to ‘find alternative vendors’ for future services. The additional planned cuts, outlined in a draft of the letter obtained by The New York Times, represented what an administration official called a complete severance of the government’s longstanding business relationship with Harvard.

This news, which NBC News has confirmed, would represent the final in a series of steps, following Team Trump’s earlier moves that froze roughly $3.2 billion in grants and contracts with Harvard.

In terms of the motivation for all of this, the official administration line was that this had something to do with antisemitism, but Trump himself published an online rant recently that suggested the real motivation is his disgust for the university’s faculty and his perceptions of the school’s ideological leanings.

The president has also complained that he believes some incoming Harvard students “need remedial math” and that he “assumes” that “many” of the university’s foreign students are “bad.”

But while the administration struggles to figure out why it’s doing this, Trump also apparently has a new idea about what to do with the money that was supposed to go to Harvard. The New York Times also reported:

President Trump floated a new plan on Monday for the $3 billion he wants to strip from Harvard University, saying in a social media post that he was thinking about using the money to fund vocational schools. ‘I am considering taking THREE BILLION DOLLARS of Grant Money away from a very antisemitic Harvard, and giving it to TRADE SCHOOLS all across our land,’ Mr. Trump posted on Truth Social, his social media platform.

I won’t pretend to know how such a plan might be implemented, but the president apparently envisions a model in which billions of dollars that were supposed to go to Harvard will simply be redistributed to vocational schools.

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This is worth dwelling on because it reflects Trump’s ignorance about the basic elements of the fight he picked unnecessarily.

Harvard didn’t earn grants because federal officials thought it was a good school; it received scholarly research grants that were awarded after a competitive process. When the National Institutes of Health partnered with Harvard on biomedical research, for example, the investment wasn’t about helping the university, it was about helping us.

There’s nothing wrong with vocational schools, but they’re not in a position to do the kind of world-class biomedical research that Harvard received grants to do. Trump can try to redirect the resources, but then that biomedical research won’t happen, and it’s the public that will suffer the consequences.

Harvard also received a grant, for example, to understand why military veterans are more likely to be diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (aka Lou Gehrig’s disease). Other frozen grants include money to fund other medical research intended to help veterans.

The more Trump tries to punish Harvard, the more people who have nothing to do with the university will feel the effects of the president’s offensive.