Trump administration must restore hundreds of UCLA research grants, judge rules

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore hundreds of UCLA science research grants that were abruptly frozen to punish the university over campus antisemitism findings, a ruling that is the first legal test of whether a wider funding freeze will pass court muster.

In a late Tuesday decision, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California said the government’s latest slashing of UCLA funds violated her June order blocking National Science Foundation research grant terminations throughout the 10-campus system.

She told the Trump administration to file an update by Aug. 19 detailing whether it had restored the grants and if not, “an explanation of why it was not feasible and a description of the steps that have been taken thus far.”

The class-action case was filed independently by UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley professors fighting a separate, earlier round of Trump administration science grant clawbacks. The ruling affects only a portion of the recent UCLA cuts, about 300 NSF grants totaling $81 million out of $584 million in suspensions. Hundreds of grants from the National Institutes of Health and Department of Energy are still on hold.

Lin’s ruling lands amid a high-stakes conflict involving the nation’s premier public university system, the Trump administration and increasingly strident statements from Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has warned that California leaders will “never bend the knee” to federal demands. The administration is seeking a $1-billion fine and a host of additional concessions to resolve federal antisemitism findings against the university.

The battle with UC is part of a broader drive by President Trump to remake American higher education, targeting elite universities as bastions of liberalism. Federal officials have accused UCLA of failure to “promote a research environment free of antisemitism” and alleged discrimination in admissions against white and Asian Americans.

The UC Board of Regents has not decided whether it will sue over the fine and broader cuts — although Newsom said publicly Trump’s demands are tantamount to “extortion” and that he supports a lawsuit against the administration.

In a statement, a UC spokesperson said the restoration of funding in the Tuesday court filing would be “critical” to the university.

“While we have not had an opportunity to review the court’s order and were not party to the suit, restoration of National Science Foundation funds is critical to research the University of California performs on behalf of California and the nation,” said Stett Holbrook, associate director of strategic and critical communications.

An NSF spokesperson said Wednesday that the the agency had followed the court order to reinstate grants to UCLA. UCLA also sent an email to researchers confirming the restorations.

A spokesperson for the Department of Justice, which represents the government in the case, declined to comment.

The department is already fighting Lin’s June order in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. As of Wednesday, it had not made a filing in the appeal related to Lin’s decision on UCLA.

Claudia Polsky, a UC Berkeley law professor representing researchers in the case, said in an interview that she hoped the results would aid UCLA in “resisting” the Trump administration’s cuts and its demand that the university pay $1 billion to restore grants.

“Hundreds of UCLA researchers can now get back into labs, into the field, and back on task,” said Polsky, who worked with UC Berkeley law school Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and San Francisco law firm Lieff Cabraser on the case. “Further: With hundreds of its suspended grants now ordered reinstated, UCLA should have considerably more leverage than it had this morning in resisting Trump administration demands that wrongly take research hostage for political dealmaking.”

How the case was argued

Because the Tuesday order only affects NSF grants, UCLA is still grappling with a massive funding loss.

The question at the center of the Tuesday hearing was whether the freezes on NSF grants at UCLA were a violation of Lin’s June court order that blocked science funding terminations throughout the system.

UC professors funded by the NSF, Environmental Protection Agency and National Endowment for the Humanities had argued they faced cuts because their grants appeared in federal keyword searches related to race amid President Trump’s push to rid the government of diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

They also said their funding was removed through the use of generic form letters with no explanation. They argued federal law requires that government officials cite the reasons why money already approved through a competitive application process was taken away.

Lin said she was inclined to agree with researcher arguments while the case proceeded. She issued a preliminary injunction on June 23.

What happened at Tuesday’s hearing

On Tuesday, Lin challenged Trump administration lawyers to explain why their latest science cuts at UCLA did not violate her earlier court order.

“Two weeks ago, NSF went out and, again, used form letters to cut off funding to researchers at UCLA en masse,” Lin said. She asked Justice Department lawyers what set apart the most recent cuts from previous ones she enjoined.

Government lawyers replied that the funding freezes were “suspensions,” not “terminations,” which were the subject of Lin’s earlier ruling.

Justice Department lawyer Michael Velchik argued that the grants had been cut so recently that they could not be viewed as “terminations.”

“A week is certainly not enough time for this court to adjudicate that a suspension of one week is de facto a termination,” Velchik said.

In her Tuesday order, Lin, a Biden appointee, disagreed.

“NSF’s indefinite suspensions differ from a termination in name only,” she wrote.

Lin later added: “For avoidance of doubt, the court also clarifies that grant ‘termination,’ as the term is used in the preliminary Injunction, encompasses circumstances where grant funding is cut off on a long-term or indefinite basis, like the suspensions carried out by NSF on July 30” at UCLA.

Government lawyers also said the Trump administration did not freeze all grants to UCLA but spared some that were “critical” and “important.”

They did not elaborate on which or how many grants those were. This answer came in response to Lin’s questions about whether the government was indiscriminately cutting grants — an issue that led her to block terminations earlier in the summer.

Chemerinsky, the UC Berkeley law dean, represented the researchers in oral arguments.

He said at the hearing that the UCLA cuts amounted to “exactly the kind of en masse terminations that the court enjoined previously.”

For researchers, Chemerinsky said, the terms “suspension” and “termination” are the same.

“They can no longer pay rent, no longer pay graduate students, no longer pay postdocs. There is no difference,” Chemerinsky said.

The Berkeley professor accused the government of “holding hostage all the individual grants to try to coerce UCLA into a settlement.”

Velchik disagreed.

“There are legitimate and bona fide concerns that the government has with the conduct that has taken place at UCLA,” he said, saying the university has had “gross and horrific” antisemitism and also mentioning allegations of “racial preferences” at the UCLA medical school.

Aradna Tripati, a UCLA professor of climate science and geochemistry and director of the Center for Developing Leadership in Science, expects two suspended grants restored as a result of Lin’s order. One covers environmental research in the Southwest and the other trains veterans who want to work in science, technology, engineering and math fields.

“The recent victory halting federal cuts to the UC system is one we should all be celebrating,” Tripati said. “UCLA and public universities are a public good, serving students from all backgrounds and communities, employing people, and supporting discovery and applied work that translates into better economic outcomes and lives for everyone.”