The Trump administration is cutting research funding from UCLA, the university’s leader announced, the latest prestigious university to be targeted in President Donald Trump’s war on higher education.
In a letter to the campus community Thursday night, university Chancellor Julio Frenk said the school had been notified that the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, along with other agencies, are “suspending certain research funding” to the school.
“This is not only a loss to the researchers who rely on critical grants,” Frenk wrote. “It is a loss for Americans across the nation whose work, health, and future depend on the groundbreaking work we do.”
Frenk’s letter said “hundreds of grants may be lost” but did not provide further details on the scope, but the Los Angeles Times reported that it accounted for about $200 million in funding. POLITICO has not independently confirmed that number, and spokespeople for UCLA and the U.S. Education Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
UCLA is the latest university to come under fire from the Trump administration, which purports it is targeting elite colleges and universities in an effort to root out antisemitism in higher education.
The Trump administration has been locked in conflicts with several universities over similar cuts — including most notably Harvard. There are interlocking legal battles to stop the Trump administration’s efforts to block foreign students from attending the university and to restore the flow of billions of dollars worth of federal grants.
Several major universities have agreed to significant settlements with the administration in order to get their funding restored, including Columbia University and Brown University earlier this week. Frenk wrote that the university is “actively evaluating our best course of action.”
In his letter, Frenk — who is Jewish and recounted that his paternal grandparents and father left Germany in the 1930s to escape that “climate of antisemitism and hate” — says the administration "claims antisemitism and bias as the reasons” for the cuts to UCLA.
“This far-reaching penalty of defunding life-saving research does nothing to address any alleged discrimination,” he wrote.
The funding cut to UCLA comes just three days after the university agreed to a $6.5 million settlement in a lawsuit with Jewish students and a professor, who alleged that the university did not do enough to protect them from harassment and discrimination by pro-Palestinian protesters last year.
On that same day, the Department of Justice alleged that UCLA had violated federal civil rights law in its response to the encampments on campus.
“We share the goal of eradicating antisemitism across society. Antisemitism has no place on our campus, nor does any form of discrimination,” Frenk wrote Thursday. “We recognize that we can improve, and I am committed to doing so.”
Through the beginning of his second term, Trump and other administration officials have used the power of the federal government to target his perceived critics and enemies. In addition to the targeting of major universities, his administration has launched investigations into former government officials from past administrations and attacked law firms that have represented clients the president dislikes.
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