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Cash-rich Harvard says they can no longer give away free air conditioners to the poor, blame Trump for funding cuts

Tuesday, July 21, 2026•
3 min read
MDN Staff
•
Cash-rich Harvard says they can no longer give away free air conditioners to the poor, blame Trump for funding cuts

The school's endowment jumped $3.7 billion last year alone, but its T.H. Chan School still says it can't cover the 40 window units Trump's cuts took off the table. Photo: John Phelan / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0).

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BOSTON — Harvard University, sitting on a record $56.9 billion endowment, says it still can't afford to hand out free window air conditioners to low-income Boston seniors — and it's Trump's fault.
The T.H. Chan School of Public Health had planned to give 100 window units to Boston residents ages 55 to 95, many suffering from lung conditions like COPD, split across the summers of 2025 and 2026 as part of a health study on cooling access. Last summer, after the Trump administration froze roughly $3 billion in federal grants to Harvard, the giveaway was scaled back to 60 units — leaving 40 vulnerable elderly Bostonians without the promised air conditioning through two straight New England heat waves, the Boston Globe reported.

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The full study was funded by a $3.75 million three-year NIH grant. Harvard's endowment grew by $3.7 billion in fiscal year 2025 alone — nearly one thousand times the entire budget of the AC study — and the school raised a record $1 billion in donations the same year, according to Harvard's own financial report.
Gary Adamkiewicz, the Harvard associate professor running the AC study, told the Globe last summer that "it really breaks my heart" seniors were left sweating during a June heat wave. His colleague on the project, Mary Berlik Rice, said she had "put so much energy into this study" and was "trying to find a way." A year later, that way apparently does not involve Harvard's own bank account.
The T.H. Chan School depends on federal grants for roughly 40 percent of its budget, and two other heat-related projects — a rooftop-painting study in South Africa and a cooling-center effort in Madagascar — were also canceled after the freeze.
Harvard has spent the past year publicly fighting the Trump administration in federal court over the cuts, arguing they amount to unconstitutional retaliation. The school said in October that most of the canceled research money has since been restored.
The 40 missing air conditioners, apparently, are not among them.

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Cash-rich Harvard says they can no longer give away free air conditioners to the poor, blame Trump for funding cuts - Mass Daily News