Donald Trump is abusing every tool of the vast power of the federal government in his attempt to make the universities personally subservient to him. His latest attempt is a threat to seize Harvard’s patents.

The Guardian reports:

The latest phase of the Trump administration’s offensive against Harvard University is a comprehensive review of the university’s federally funded research programs, and the threat to strip the school’s lucrative portfolio of patents.

In a letter to the Harvard president, Alan Garber, posted online on Friday, Donald Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, accused Harvard of breaching its legal and contractual requirements tied to federally funded research programs and patents.

Lutnick also said the commerce department had begun a “march-in” process under the federal Bayh-Dole Act that could let the government take ownership of the patents or grant licenses. …

He said that carried a “critical responsibility” for Harvard to ensure that its intellectual property derived from federal funding is used to maximize benefits to the American people.

Tech industry leaders who have supported Trump might want to reflect that patents are now no longer safe from arbitrary expropriation—and that the U.S. Patent Office has been swept up in Trump’s takeover of the Library of Congress.