Trump's urge to defuse Harvard leads to this

The step of the Trump administration to cancel a number of federal contracts at Harvard University has triggered an internal collision on the effects on medical research that is supposed to help veterans, including projects that affect suicide prevention, poisonous particle exposure and prostate cancer screening, according to e -emails from the New York Times.

The dispute between the officials of the veteran department has partly focused on working with the Harvard Medical School in order to develop a predictive model that can use the VA emergency to decide whether suicide veterans should be brought to the hospital according to.

By canceling this contract, Seth J. Custer, an official of the VA office for research and development of the VA in an e -mail on May 8, would have prevented “more veteran self -murders”, which asked the agency's executives to reverse their decision. But John Figueroa, a long -time healthcare leader in the private industry and senior consultant from Doug Collins, the veterans Affairs Secretary, said that researchers could instead work instead of other institutions.

Peter Kasperowicz, a VA spokesman, said that the research contracts of the department with Harvard have been “checked”. He said the goal of the review was to ensure that “the projects best support the Veterans-First-Agenda of the Trump government”.

Mr. Custer refused to comment. In a short telephone interview, Mr. Figueroa said that the VA had examined the “every contract” that it had issued. A spokeswoman for the White House rejected a statement. So also a spokeswoman for Harvard.

The tensions within the VA about the Harvard contracts show how President Trump's use of research funds as a lever in his broader pressure campaign in at universities brings political risks. Mr. Trump and other Republicans have thrown veterans over as an important political constituency, and Mr. Collins has repeatedly promised that veteran care is not affected, even if it fulfills great cost reduction and other changes.