The U.S. Department of Defense is severing military-sponsored scholarships for active-duty students attending the NYU School of Law due to an unspecified “risk,” according to an email leaked last week.

The email detailed that the federal government “will no longer pay” for recipients of the Funded Legal Education Program, which covers law school tuition and fees for military personnel, at 35 private universities, including NYU, Harvard University and Yale University. It categorizes the listed law schools as “moderate to high risk” and therefore ineligible for tuition funding sponsored by the DOD. 

The leaked email from the Judge Advocate Recruiting Office, which circulated social media on Feb. 13, ordered FLEP recipients to withdraw their applications or rescind their acceptances to any law schools on the list. Applicants who are in the program but pay their own tuition and have reduced active-duty obligations are “encouraged” to consider attending law schools not named on the list — which the email said may expand to include public institutions.

The development came days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth severed all military programs at Harvard earlier this month, claiming the school partners with the Chinese Communist Party in research, and that its leadership encourages antisemitism and DEI-related discrimination on campus.

“All of our departments — army, navy and air force — will evaluate all existing graduate programs for active-duty service members for all ivy league universities and other civilian universities,” Hegseth said in a video posted on X. “We train warriors, not wokesters.”

Hegseth added that the federal government will evaluate whether graduate programs provide “cost-effective, strategic education for future senior leaders” in comparison with military master’s programs and public universities. A source told CNN that Hegseth also ordered military services to consider pulling funding from universities that “diminish critical thinking,” harbor bias against the U.S. military and host “troublesome partnerships with foreign adversaries.” 

Last year, NYU’s graduate programs were investigated by the Department of Education for allegedly “engaging in race-exclusionary practices” and it was named on a list of 10 colleges to be investigated for alleged antisemitism. President Linda Mills recently warned that the university ran a $71 million deficit in the last fiscal year, following a loss of federal funding.

An NYU spokesperson did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the DOD redirected WSN to Hegseth’s X video. 

Correction, 2/20: A previous version of this article incorrectly referred to the U.S. Department of Defense as the U.S. Department of War.

Contact Jason Alpert-Wisnia at [email protected].