Harvard ban threatens startup pipeline
President Trump's decision to prevent international students from studying at Harvard could hurt America's economy by reducing the number of startup founders.
Why it matters: Trump is aiming at Harvard, but buckshot may hit the innovation engine that America needs to stay ahead of China.
🧮 By the numbers: Around 44% of U.S. unicorn companies — startups valued at $1 billion or more — are founded or cofounded by immigrants.
Some of them moved to the U.S. as children, but many came for school, then stayed to build their businesses.
An Axios analysis shows that around two dozen U.S. unicorns were founded or cofounded by international students who studied at Harvard. Under Trump's rule, none of them would have been allowed to enroll.
Among those unicorns are payments giant Stripe, cybersecurity firm CloudFlare, crypto brokerage FalconX and generative AI startup Writer.
🔬 Zoom in: Harvard ranks as one of America's top schools for educating startup founders, ranking third for undergrads, second for grad students, and first for MBAs, according to PitchBook.
The big picture: Harvard is just one U.S. university out of thousands, but it has an outsized global reputation.
For the more than 6,000 current Harvard students, some may seek to transfer — although it could be quite onerous, particularly for those in the midst of scientific graduate degrees that are tied to specific professors.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
15 minutes ago
- Yahoo
What White House reportedly said about the future of Mark Carney's daughter at Harvard
As Harvard University remains the focus of the Trump administration's ire, the fate of its international students hangs in balance, including Cleo Carney, the daughter of the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. A little over a week ago, the Trump administration cancelled Harvard's ability to enroll international students, leaving current foreign students to transfer to other colleges or risk losing their visa status. 'They have lost their Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification as a result of their failure to adhere to the law,' Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted on X on May 22. 'Let this serve as a warning to all universities and academic institutions across the country.' In return, the university sued the administration and won its initial court fight. The university on its website notes: 'The May 29 court decision allows the University to continue enrolling international students and scholars while the case moves forward. Harvard will continue to take steps to protect the rights of our international students and scholars, members of our community who are vital to the University's academic mission and community — and whose presence here benefits our country immeasurably.' For the academic year 2024-2025, the Ivy League university had 6,793 international students enrolled. As for the Canadians at Harvard, the unofficial statistics of scholars and students on its various campus roughly has ranged between 600 to under 800 over the years. A first-year student, Cleo is pursuing bachelor's in economics at the prestigious university, one her father graduated from in 1987. After Justin Trudeau stepped down as Prime Minister, Cleo introduced her father as the newly elected party leader in March at the Liberal Convention in Ottawa. A sustainability REP for Harvard's Resource Efficiency Program, Cleo also serves as a board member for Bluedot Institute, a climate-focused non-profit. 'When she is not cooking or running,' reads her Harvard bio, 'she is talking about the need for increased investment in the strategic mining industry.' 'The White House confirmed Carney, along with other international students, would get the boot if the administration gets its way,' Gabrielle Fahmy for the New York Post wrote on Saturday. 'The President's goal is clear: we will put America first, and that means our policies on everything from trade to immigration should benefit Americans, not other nations at the expense of our people,' a senior administration official told the New York Post. National Post has reached out to the Prime Minister's Office for comment. As Cleo's return to Harvard in September remains undecided, the academic future of her siblings — Tess, Amelia and Sasha — less so. Sasha graduated from Yale University in 2023, Amelia reportedly from the University of Edinburgh last year, and Tess has noticeably stayed out of the public eye. Inside Mark Carney's PMO where ministers get called out, punctuality matters and patience is on short supply 'It's done': Trump's 51st state comments are 'behind us,' says U.S. ambassador to Canada Our website is the place for the latest breaking news, exclusive scoops, longreads and provocative commentary. Please bookmark and sign up for our daily newsletter, Posted, here.
Los Angeles Times
16 minutes ago
- Los Angeles Times
Can Trump fix the national debt? GOP senators, many investors and even Elon Musk have doubts
WASHINGTON — President Trump faces the challenge of convincing Republican senators, global investors, voters and even Elon Musk that he won't bury the federal government in debt with his multitrillion-dollar tax breaks package. The response so far from financial markets has been skeptical as Trump seems unable to trim deficits as promised. 'All of this rhetoric about cutting trillions of dollars of spending has come to nothing — and the tax bill codifies that,' said Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. 'There is a level of concern about the competence of Congress and this administration and that makes adding a whole bunch of money to the deficit riskier.' The White House has viciously lashed out at anyone who has voiced concern about the debt snowballing under Trump, even though it did exactly that in his first term after his 2017 tax cuts. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt opened her briefing Thursday by saying she wanted 'to debunk some false claims' about his tax cuts. Leavitt said the 'blatantly wrong claim that the 'One, Big, Beautiful Bill' increases the deficit is based on the Congressional Budget Office and other scorekeepers who use shoddy assumptions and have historically been terrible at forecasting across Democrat and Republican administrations alike.' House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) piled onto Congress' number crunchers on Sunday, telling NBC's 'Meet the Press,' 'The CBO sometimes gets projections correct, but they're always off, every single time, when they project economic growth. They always underestimate the growth that will be brought about by tax cuts and reduction in regulations.' But Trump himself has suggested that the lack of sufficient spending cuts to offset his tax reductions came out of the need to hold the Republican congressional coalition together. 'We have to get a lot of votes,' Trump said last week. 'We can't be cutting.' That has left the administration betting on the hope that economic growth can do the trick, a belief that few outside of Trump's orbit think is viable. Most economists consider the non-partisan CBO to be the foundational standard for assessing policies, though it does not produce cost estimates for actions taken by the executive branch such as Trump's unilateral tariffs. Tech billionaire Musk, who was until recently part of Trump's inner sanctum as the leader of the Department of Government Efficiency, told CBS News: 'I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly, which increases the budget deficit, not just decreases it, and undermines the work that the DOGE team is doing.' The tax and spending cuts that passed the House last month would add more than $5 trillion to the national debt in the coming decade if all of them are allowed to continue, according to the Committee for a Responsible Financial Budget, a fiscal watchdog group. To make the bill's price tag appear lower, various parts of the legislation are set to expire. This same tactic was used with Trump's 2017 tax cuts and it set up this year's dilemma, in which many of the tax cuts in that earlier package will sunset next year unless Congress renews them. But the debt is a much bigger problem now than it was eight years ago. Investors are demanding the government pay a higher premium to keep borrowing as the total debt has crossed $36.1 trillion. The interest rate on a 10-year Treasury note is around 4.5%, up dramatically from the roughly 2.5% rate being charged when the 2017 tax cuts became law. The White House Council of Economic Advisers argues that its policies will unleash so much rapid growth that the annual budget deficits will shrink in size relative to the overall economy, putting the U.S. government on a fiscally sustainable path. The council argues the economy would expand over the next four years at an annual average of about 3.2%, instead of the Congressional Budget Office's expected 1.9%, and as many as 7.4 million jobs would be created or saved. Council chair Stephen Miran told reporters that when the growth being forecast by the White House is coupled with expected revenues from tariffs, the expected budget deficits will fall. The tax cuts will increase the supply of money for investment, the supply of workers and the supply of domestically produced goods — all of which, by Miran's logic, would cause faster growth without creating new inflationary pressures. 'I do want to assure everyone that the deficit is a very significant concern for this administration,' Miran said. White House budget director Russell Vought told reporters the idea that the bill is 'in any way harmful to debt and deficits is fundamentally untrue.' Most outside economists expect additional debt would keep interest rates higher and slow overall economic growth as the cost of borrowing for homes, cars, businesses and even college educations would increase. 'This just adds to the problem future policymakers are going to face,' said Brendan Duke, a former Biden administration aide now at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal think tank. Duke said that with the tax cuts in the bill set to expire in 2028, lawmakers would be 'dealing with Social Security, Medicare and expiring tax cuts at the same time.' Kent Smetters, faculty director of the Penn Wharton Budget Model, said the growth projections from Trump's economic team are 'a work of fiction.' He said the bill would lead some workers to choose to work fewer hours in order to qualify for Medicaid. 'I don't know of any serious forecaster that has meaningfully raised their growth forecast because of this legislation,' said Harvard University professor Jason Furman, who was the Council of Economic Advisers chair under the Obama administration. 'These are mostly not growth- and competitiveness-oriented tax cuts. And, in fact, the higher long-term interest rates will go the other way and hurt growth.' The White House's inability so far to calm deficit concerns is stirring up political blowback for Trump as the tax and spending cuts approved by the House now move to the Senate. Republican Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky have both expressed concerns about the likely deficit increases, with Johnson saying there are enough senators to stall the bill until deficits are addressed. 'I think we have enough to stop the process until the president gets serious about the spending reduction and reducing the deficit,' Johnson said on CNN. The White House is also banking that tariff revenues will help cover the additional deficits, even though recent court rulings cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump declaring an economic emergency to impose sweeping taxes on imports. When Trump announced his near-universal tariffs in April, he specifically said his policies would generate enough new revenues to start paying down the national debt. His comments dovetailed with remarks by aides, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, that yearly budget deficits could be more than halved. 'It's our turn to prosper and in so doing, use trillions and trillions of dollars to reduce our taxes and pay down our national debt, and it'll all happen very quickly,' Trump said two months ago as he talked up his import taxes and encouraged lawmakers to pass the separate tax and spending cuts. The Trump administration is correct that growth can help reduce deficit pressures, but it's not enough on its own to accomplish the task, according to new research by economists Douglas Elmendorf, Glenn Hubbard and Zachary Liscow. Ernie Tedeschi, director of economics at the Budget Lab at Yale University, said additional 'growth doesn't even get us close to where we need to be.' The government would need $10 trillion of deficit reduction over the next 10 years just to stabilize the debt, Tedeschi said. And even though the White House says the tax cuts would add to growth, most of the cost goes to preserve existing tax breaks, so that's unlikely to boost the economy meaningfully. 'It's treading water,' Tedeschi said. Boak writes for the Associated Press.
Yahoo
29 minutes ago
- Yahoo
After Trump administration axes $500 million from Washington dam project, Patty Murray says she won't let it happen again
May 31—WASHINGTON — The most fundamental job of Congress is to fund the government each year, typically through a bipartisan process that distributes dollars more or less evenly between red states and blue states. But a dustup over a dam construction project in Washington state has thrown a wrench into that process and raised the stakes of a government funding showdown in September. Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, has accused President Donald Trump's administration of pulling $500 million that Congress allocated last year to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a fish passage project on the Green River, east of Tacoma. In a news conference at the Capitol alongside her fellow Democratic senators from Washington and California, Murray said that move undermines the trust lawmakers rely on to negotiate spending bills. "Trump is robbing our states in broad daylight, and we are not going to be quiet about this," Murray said. "President Trump is ripping up the road map that we all agreed on, even the House Republicans, and turning the Army Corps construction funds into his personal political slush fund." After Republicans and Democrats in Congress agreed last year to appropriate the money for construction at Howard Hanson Dam, Trump shot down the bipartisan funding bill they had negotiated and Congress eventually passed a short-term funding bill, with the help of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and a handful of other Democrats. Murray staunchly opposed that legislation, warning that its wording would give extraordinary leeway to the White House. Her fears came to pass when Trump's Office of Management and Budget — helmed by Russell Vought, a lead architect of the policy initiative known as Project 2025 — intervened to redirect Army Corps funding from states represented in the Senate by Democrats to those represented by Republicans. As the Columbian of Vancouver, Washington, reported, an analysis by Murray's office found that the Trump administration reallocated funds that were split roughly 50-50 between red and blue states so that only 33% of the money goes to states with two Democratic senators, while 64% goes to states with only GOP senators and 4% to "purple" states with one senator from each party. In addition to zeroing out the funding for Howard Hanson Dam, the Trump administration cut overall funding for the Army Corps' civil works projects by about $1.5 billion and slashed the Columbia River Fish Mitigation program — intended to reduce the impact of dams on salmon and steelhead runs — by nearly half. In response to questions from The Spokesman-Review, the Office of Management and Budget didn't directly say what role it had played in redirecting Army Corps' resources or why it had defunded the Howard Hanson Dam project. But the office said the new Army Corps work plan "will generate billions of dollars in economic activity by building American energy dominance and shipping capacity while investing in important conservation projects." "The available funds were allocated by the administration based on need and urgency, in accordance with the guidelines set by Congress," the office said in a statement. In a House subcommittee hearing on May 21, Army Corps official Robyn Colosimo confirmed that it was the Office of Management and Budget, and likely Vought , that made the decision to shift the money to red states. The Army Corps didn't respond to a request for comment from The Spokesman-Review, but a spokesman for the agency previously told the Columbian that the Columbia River Fish Mitigation funding is "an important source for many projects in the basin" and the Army Corps would "work with our partners in the region to prioritize projects depending on how much funding we actually receive from Congress." That proposition gets more complicated if the Trump administration, which has taken a maximalist view of executive power, can change how much money agencies receive from Congress. At the news conference, Murray said she intends to "explore every opportunity and every wording" as she crafts the language of the next funding bill "to make sure that we have funds protected." Congress has been historically unproductive this year, and the annual appropriations process is so far behind schedule that another short-term spending bill is the most realistic option to avert a government shutdown when the current stopgap bill expires at the end of September. Even with Republicans in control of both the House and Senate, they need Democratic senators to help pass a spending bill. That gives Democrats some leverage to include language in the legislation to require that funds be spent as Congress directs, but it would require the party to be willing to let the government shut down. By choosing to help Republicans pass the partisan spending bill in March, Schumer may have squandered that leverage and encouraged the GOP to try the same move again. If Murray can help it, she said, the government won't operate under such an open-ended funding bill when the next fiscal year begins in October. Orion Donovan Smith's work is funded in part by members of the Spokane community via the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund. This story can be republished by other organizations for free under a Creative Commons license. For more information on this, please contact our newspaper's managing editor.
