Maryland Governor Wes Moore, appearing at Harvard’s Institute of Politics on Wednesday morning, said the Trump administration was engaged in unconstitutional overreach in its campaign against Harvard and other American universities and warned that federal courts had to hold the executive branch to its limits.
Moore spoke at the Institute of Politics’ monthly Breakfast Club forum on September 10, then joined the Breakfast Club podcast for a longer interview released the same day. He said the administration was treating the Constitution as a “suggestion box” and that a pattern of executive action against a wide set of higher-education institutions had to be met by decisions from the courts.
The governor’s remarks came nearly 18 months into the administration’s public confrontation with Harvard, a period during which the Department of Justice has filed two lawsuits against the university this spring: one alleging Harvard violated federal civil rights law in its response to campus antisemitism, and one alleging Harvard stonewalled two federal investigations into its admissions practices. Harvard won two significant court victories last fall in the same dispute, decisions that restored nearly $2.7 billion in federal research funding and blocked the administration’s effort to prevent the university from enrolling international students.
Maryland joined 19 Democratic states and the District of Columbia last month on an amicus brief supporting Harvard’s effort to retain its federal research grants. The brief argued that the administration’s attempt to strip a research university of federal funding as a policy lever set a precedent that could reach every state that hosts a major public or private research campus, and that the loss of any one flagship’s federal research base would ripple through state economies and workforce pipelines.
Moore, a first-term governor running for re-election this fall, has been discussed widely as a possible 2028 Democratic presidential candidate. In the podcast interview he did not rule out a future run, and he framed the current university fight as part of a larger question about the limits of executive authority that would outlast any single administration.
The Harvard dispute has drawn attention from other Democratic governors. Governors and attorneys general in states with large research universities have argued that federal grant funding is essential infrastructure for state economies, and several have publicly opposed the administration’s use of enforcement letters and funding freezes as tools against individual campuses. Moore’s Harvard appearance places Maryland squarely inside that coalition.
The Institute of Politics’ Breakfast Club series has featured a rotating list of national Democratic figures in the past two years, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and former Transportation Secretary Peter Buttigieg, and Moore’s appearance continues a series that has served as a soft launch pad for national political travel. Whether Moore’s decision to lay down a constitutional argument at Harvard signals a sharper turn in his national messaging or reflects Maryland’s specific interest in the research-funding fight, the governor made clear that he expects courts, and eventually voters, to draw the line on how far a president can go in disciplining a university.
