Former Harvard University President Larry Summers assailed President Donald Trump over his deepening attacks on the school, slamming a “wildly extralegal” federal funding freeze earlier this week and warning of government “tyranny.” 

“This is not an isolated thing, what’s being done to Harvard,” Summers said in an interview Wednesday with Bloomberg Television. “This is part of a broad and sweeping effort to suppress institutions that challenge the presidential administration.”

Trump is in an escalating standoff with Harvard after the government froze $2.2 billion in federal grants for the school this week. The president went on to threaten Harvard’s tax-exempt status and on Wednesday accused the school of hiring “radical left” faculty. Saying Harvard “can no longer be considered even a decent place of learning,” the president said it should no longer receive federal funds. 

The Trump administration, which has accused Harvard of mishandling antisemitism on campus, stepped up its demands last week by calling for changes to admissions and hiring practices, among other requirements. Harvard President Alan Garber rejected the terms this week, saying they made clear that the government’s intention “is not to work with us to address antisemitism.”

While Summers said Harvard still needs to do more to combat prejudice against Jews and expand intellectual diversity, he applauded the institution’s effort to stand up to Trump. 

“Universities have made some very serious mistakes, and yes, they should be pressured and pressured with escalating strength to change that,” said Summers, a paid contributor to Bloomberg TV. “But for the president of the United States to be calling for changing the tax status of his adversaries, this is new and I believe authoritarian and a real question about our democracy.”

A former U.S. Treasury secretary, Summers said he hoped Harvard would find ways to maintain important research in the face of the federal funding cut, warning of long-term damage from a protracted battle between universities and the Trump administration. 

“If the U.S. government goes to war with our great universities, it means a sharp reduction in the kind of scientific progress that has caused the United States to be the envy of the world,” he said. “It means the end of efforts at cures to diseases like cancer and diabetes. It means a substantial risk to our national security, because one of our great national assets has been our capacity for innovation.”

Based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard is the oldest and richest U.S. university. It boasts a $53 billion endowment. 

“Harvard should not go interjecting itself into politics,” Summers said. But “if an institution like Harvard cannot resist tyranny when applied to it,” he said, “then who can?”

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The Trump administration plans to eliminate the IRS’ Direct File program, an electronic system for filing tax returns directly to the agency for free, according to two people familiar with the decision.

The program developed during Joe Biden’s presidency was credited by users with making tax filing easy, fast and economical. But Republican lawmakers and commercial tax preparation companies complained it was a waste of taxpayer money because free filing programs already exist, although they are hard to use.

The program had been in limbo since the start of the Trump administration as Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency have slashed their way through the federal government. Musk posted in February on his social media site, X, that he had “deleted” 18F, a government agency that worked on technology projects such as Direct File.

There was some hope that Musk, with his DOGE team of computer programmers, could take over Direct File and improve it. But the two people familiar with the decision to end Direct File said its future became clear when the IRS staff assigned to the program were told in mid-March to stop working on its development for the 2026 tax filing season.

The two people were not authorized to publicly discuss the plans and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

Adam Ruben, a vice president at the liberal-leaning Economic Security Project, said “the fix was in from the beginning.”

“It is an outrage to see everyday taxpayers play no role in this decision,” he said. “Cutting costs and saving money for families were just empty campaign promises.”

But David Williams, president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance, which describes itself as a nonpartisan organization that disseminates research and analysis on the government’s effects on the economy, said Direct File was “problematic” from day 1, citing the program’s costs and noting that many people who started the process never finished. According to the IRS 423,450 taxpayers logged into Direct File and 140,803 submitted accepted returns in 2024.

“From hidden costs to taxpayer confusion, the program is riddled with issues,” Williams said.

Direct File was rolled out as a pilot program in 2024 after the IRS was tasked with looking into how to create a “direct file” system as part of the money it received from the Inflation Reduction Act signed into law by Biden in 2022. The Democratic administration spent tens of millions of dollars developing the program.

Last May, the agency announced that the program would be made permanent.

But the IRS has faced intense blowback to Direct File from private tax preparation companies that have made billions from charging people to use their software and have spent millions lobbying Congress. The average American typically spends about $140 preparing returns each year.

Derrick Plummer, a spokesman for the commercial tax preparation company Intuit,, said in a statement that “Direct File is and has been a solution in search of a problem, a drain on critical IRS resources and a waste of taxpayer dollars.”

The IRS accepted 140,803 returns filed by taxpayers using Direct File in the 12 states where it was available last tax season. It was expanded to include half the country this year. It is unclear how many taxpayers have used Direct File this year.

Amanda Renteria, CEO of Code for America, which worked with the IRS to create a state tax filing integration program for Direct File, said the decision was “a betrayal of public trust at precisely the time government should be demonstrating its ability to deliver basic services effectively.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a proponent of building out Direct File, said in an emailed statement that Trump and Musk “are going after Direct File because it stops giant tax prep companies from ripping taxpayers off for services that should be free. Americans want a free and easy way to file their taxes — Trump and Musk want to take that away.”

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Mark Zuckerberg said that ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok posed a “highly urgent” competitive threat to Meta Platforms Inc. when it first sprang up in 2018, as he testified for a third day in the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial.

“We observed that our growth slowed down dramatically,” as TikTok gained popularity, the Meta chief executive officer said Wednesday. “It was highly urgent, this has been a top priority for the company for several years.”

Zuckerberg spent seven hours over the past two days being interrogated by a government attorney, who pressed him to revisit the struggle for the company — then Facebook Inc. — to keep up with the mobile app boom in the previous decade. That led to the company’s purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp more than 10 years ago and, in response to TikTok, the roll out of its Reels video product for Instagram in 2020.

The FTC wants to force Meta to sell the apps as it tries to paint Zuckerberg as a shrewd executive who illegally monopolized part of the social media market by buying companies rather than competing with them. Responding to Meta’s lawyer Mark Hansen, he can tell his story without pushback.

“People will be sharing in new ways in five years, than what is happening today,” Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said Meta competes with an array of platforms, including Google’s YouTube, and Apple Inc.’s iMessage as well as Elon Musk’s X, Telegram, Microsoft Corp.’s LinkedIn and others. The FTC maintains that in the narrow market of sharing information with friends and family, Meta only competes with Snap Inc.’s Snapchat.

‘Network Effects’

Part of the FTC’s case involves the technical concept of “network effects,” meaning that the more users companies such as Meta have, the more likely they are to retain a dominant position, because people are unlikely to switch to a service used by few people.

US District Judge James Boasberg, who’s presiding over the non-jury trial in Washington, has remained largely silent during the questioning, but interjected during Zuckerberg’s testimony Wednesday to ask if network effects still really matter.

“How much does it matter if your friends are on a particular platform if you can send content out of that platform? Why does it matter if your friends are there?” the judge said.

Zuckerberg said it doesn’t. “These apps now serve primarily as discovery engines,” he said. “People can take that content to messaging engines.”

If the FTC prevails, a spinoff of Instagram and WhatsApp would undo years of integration between the apps, disrupt two of the most popular digital consumer products in the world and potentially erase hundreds of billions of dollars in Meta’s market value. It would also raise serious questions about how the government evaluates and approves deals.

Bigger Company

Under questioning by Hansen, Zuckerberg refuted the FTC’s argument that Meta bought Instagram to bury a competitor. Instagram would not likely have been able to grow to the extent it has, had it remained independent, he said. “Instagram has been built out into a much more vibrant service” as a result of the deal, Zuckerberg said.

Taking a small online platform to a billion users and beyond is unlikely to happen without the backing of a larger company, he said. “Every company that has this level of scale is owned by a bigger company,” he said, citing ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok and Google’s YouTube as examples. 

It came out earlier in the trial that Snap turned down a $6 billion offer from Facebook in 2013, and Zuckerberg said that service would have grown more had it joined his company.

In at times combative questioning earlier this week by FTC lawyer Daniel Matheson, Zuckerberg sought to walk back statements that he made in previous internal communications.

Zuckerberg acknowledged in a 2013 email blocking advertising on Facebook for messaging apps WeChat, Kakao and Line, which he wrote are “trying to build social networks to replace us.” On the stand this week, however, he said “it’s hard for me to characterize what their intent was.”

When asked by Hansen to describe how he was evaluating the competitive threat posed by Instagram and others at the time of the deals, he referenced a quote from former Intel Corp. CEO Andy Grove, saying “only the paranoid survive.”

Matheson also sought to show that Meta, then known as Facebook Inc., was aware of its antitrust risk years ago, including a possible breakup. 

He displayed an email from 2018 in which Zuckerberg wrote: “As calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years anyway.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com