Thanks to a series of settlements and court orders, some universities that had their grants frozen by the Trump administration earlier this year have seen that funding restored.

But others are still trying to unfreeze the grants and learn more about why they were suspended in the first place.

Since March, the Trump administration has said that it put nearly $6 billion on hold at nine universities. Three universities—Columbia, Penn and Brown—cut deals with the administration to restore the funding, while the University of California, Los Angeles, and Harvard got the money back via court orders. The fate of the remaining four freezes—at Duke, Cornell, Northwestern and Princeton Universities—remains uncertain.

Princeton has seen about half of its frozen grants restored, President Christopher Eisgruber told the alumni magazine in late August. Roughly $200 million was put on hold initially.

Eisgruber said Princeton never learned why the funds were frozen, beyond media reports that connected it to concerns over antisemitism on campus. A Princeton spokesperson confirmed the magazine’s report but declined to share more details about the status of the remaining grants.

At Northwestern, the Trump administration reportedly froze about $790 million in early April, though officials said at the time they never received formal notification about why the funds were put on hold. Since then, Northwestern officials have said they are working to restore the grants—a process that apparently hasn’t gone smoothly.

Northwestern University interim president Henry Bienen told The Daily Northwestern in an Oct. 17 interview that “a negotiation really requires two parties, at least, and at the present time, there’s not been anybody on the other end of the line.”

As the freeze persists, Northwestern has said it will continue to support researchers’ “essential funding needs” at least through the end of the calendar year. Bienen told the student newspaper that supporting the research costs $30 million to $40 million a month.

The university has laid off more than 400 employees and instituted other measures to cut costs, though officials said those moves were driven by more than just the funding freeze.

Cornell University is also in talks with the administration to find a solution to the freeze. However, President Michael Kotlikoff recently shared new information about the impact of the freeze that calls into question the Trump administration’s figures.

Trump officials told media outlets in April that they froze more than $1 billion at Cornell. But Kotlikoff said last week in his State of the University address that Cornell is actually facing about $250 million in canceled or unpaid research funds. (The university’s research expenditures totaled $1.6 billion in the 2023–24 academic year.)

Like Northwestern and Princeton, Cornell hasn’t received a formal letter about the freeze, though media reports suggested that the administration froze the grants “because of concerns around antisemitism following pro-Palestinian activities on campus beginning in fall of 2023,” Kotlikoff said.

Following news stories about the freeze, Kotlikoff said the university “started receiving stop-work orders ‘by direction of the White House’: halting research on everything from better tests for tick-borne diseases, to pediatric heart assist pumps, to ultrafast lasers for national defense, to AI optimization for blood transfusion delivery. At the same time, many other research grants, while not officially canceled, stopped being paid.” (About $74 million of the $250 million is in unpaid bills, he said.)

Kotlikoff added that Cornell has been talking with the federal government for six months “to identify their concerns, provide evidence to address them, and return to a productive partnership.” In August, Bloomberg reported that the White House wanted to reach a $100 million settlement with Cornell.

But Kotlikoff also criticized the administration for not using established legal processes to investigate potential civil rights violations, echoing a point experts have made for months.

“I want to be clear that there are established procedures in place for the government to handle such concerns,” he said in his State of the University address. “Accusations of discrimination should be supported by, and adjudicated on the basis of, facts. This has not happened.”

Kotlikoff, who was appointed president in March, made clear in his address to the Board of Trustees and university alumni that Cornell won’t agree to give up control of admissions or curricular decisions, among other things.

“We will not agree to allow the government to dictate our institution’s policies, or how to enforce them,” he said. “And we will never abandon our commitment to be an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.”

The administration has also said it froze about $108 million at Duke University, but neither Duke nor the National Institutes of Health responded to Inside Higher Ed’s request for an update.