A federal judge has upheld the Trump administration’s suspension of more than $400 million in federal funding to Columbia University.
On Monday, Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil of the Southern District of New York dismissed a lawsuit brought by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), two labor unions representing the Columbia faculty. She ruled that the unions had no standing to sue in the first place.
Only the university could challenge the funding freeze, the judge said.
“Our democracy cannot very well function if individual judges issue extraordinary relief to every plaintiff who clamors to object to executive action. Neither the executive branch nor the legislature ever awarded the grants and contracts at issue to plaintiffs or any of their members,” Vyskocil wrote in her opinion….