Judge orders Trump administration to restore more than $500M in UC research grants

A federal judge has ordered President Donald Trump’s administration to restore more than $500 million it withdrew in research grants from UCLA and other University of California schools that it accused of unduly favoring racial and gender minorities and allowing antisemitism on campus.

The Trump administration froze more than $324 million in research funding to UCLA on Aug. 1 and said the university would have to pay the government $1 billion and change its admission policies to recover the money. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin of San Francisco had previously ruled that the administration failed to justify the funding cutoffs, and on Monday she ordered three federal agencies to return grants it had withdrawn from researchers in science, health and the environment.

For example, Lin said, after decades of federally funded research at UCLA on reducing harmful emissions in disadvantaged communities, Trump’s Department of Transportation declared in a two-page letter that the project “discriminates on the basis of race, national origin, or other protected characteristics.”

In another cutoff notice, the Department of Health and Human Services told researchers into multiple sclerosis and dental disease that UCLA is allowing “antisemitism and bias” in its research on the environment, discriminates against women by letting transgender females compete on women’s sport teams and is conducting “illegal affirmative action,” even though California voters prohibited affirmative action in university admissions in 1996.

These “unreasoned form letters” fail to explain federal agencies’ claims that longstanding research into medical and environmental issues in low-income communities amounts to discrimination, said Lin, who was appointed by President Joe Biden. In fact, she said, the termination letters are evidence of “viewpoint discrimination.”

In challenging Lin’s earlier orders, the Trump administration’s Justice Department argued that the researchers should have filed their challenges in the Court of Federal Claims, a Washington, D.C. tribunal that considers monetary claims against the federal government. Ten of that court’s 16 current judges were appointed by Trump.

But Lin said the Court of Federal Claims hears only lawsuits by those who have contracts with the government, and in this case, those contracts were held not by the researchers but by the university, which is not a party in the lawsuit before her.

“The government’s position is that it could flagrantly violate the rights of researchers — even by terminating the federal funding of all Black researchers, or every researcher with an Asian last name — and the researchers would have nowhere to sue to undo those wrongs, unless their universities decided to sue in the Court of Federal Claims,” Lin wrote.

“The district courts are the only forum where the UC researchers could defend their constitutional and statutory rights,” the judge said, citing a ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals allowing their suit to proceed. “This Court will not shut its doors to them.”

Claudia Polsky, a UC Berkeley law professor and the attorney for the researchers in the case, said the ruling is a victory for academic study as well as freedom of thought.

“Every week and month they can keep the funding turned on, they can do research, not have to fire staff or end their labs,” Polsky said Tuesday. She said the decision also “gives the UC system and UCLA leverage in negotiating with Trump,” who is “trying to extort a billion-plus dollars” from the Los Angeles university.

Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre declined to comment. The department could appeal the ruling to the 9th Circuit.