A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Tuesday to restore some of the funding it cut from the University of California, Los Angeles in late July, handing a partial victory to the UC system as it faces a $1 billion settlement demand from the White House over alleged antisemitism on campus.
It was not immediately clear how much money would be returned to the campus. The ruling is only expected to apply to around 300 grants from the National Science Foundation out of the roughly 800 awards the Trump administration suspended, totaling $584 million, from the NSF, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy.
Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District Court of California had already sided with the UC in June when she barred the National Science Foundation from terminating additional grants to UC researchers. In her ruling Tuesday, Lin said the foundation had violated that order by cutting off funding to UCLA and ordered any suspended grants by the agency between July 30 and Aug. 12 to be restored.
The Trump administration last week demanded that UCLA pay a $1 billion fine to resolve alleged civil rights violations and agree to sweeping changes to campus protest rules and admissions standards in order to access the grant money. The UC Board of Regents held an emergency meeting Monday on the proposal, President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to force higher education institutions to pay steep penalties for what the White House calls civil rights violations.
Attorneys for the Trump administration during a virtual hearing Tuesday argued that the July funding freeze was an “indefinite suspension,” distinct from the grant “terminations” outlawed by Lin’s prior ruling. But Lin ruled there is no "principled difference” between the two terms.
“The suspensions have the same effect, and are based on the same type of deficient explanations, as the original terminations,” Lin wrote.
Claudia Polsky, director of the environmental law clinic at UC Berkeley and an attorney for the plaintiffs, said after the ruling that she “expected Judge Lin to call NSF on its semantic evasion.”
“We are delighted that millions of dollars of grants wrongfully held hostage in the Administration's political negotiations with UCLA will now be restored,” Polsky said.
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law who also serves as counsel for the researchers, said during the hearing that “the government's position would make a mockery of the court's order.”
“The government could simply take every termination, call it a suspension — and then avoid the court's order,” Chemerinsky said. “When you look at it from the perspective of researchers, a suspension has exactly the same effect as a termination. The research has to stop, labs will need to close, graduate students and post docs will lose their jobs. Papers won't be published.”
Michael Velchik, an attorney with the Department of Justice, contended that the Trump administration also initially treated the funding cuts to Ivy League schools such as Harvard and Columbia as “suspensions,” allowing the universities to take “corrective actions” or begin settlement negotiations.
Lin had issued a preliminary injunction in June that ordered the Trump administration to restore millions of dollars in funding in a lawsuit brought by six UC researchers. The plaintiffs in that case, the first-class action lawsuit challenging Trump’s grant terminations, included the UCLA funding cuts as part of that injunction.
Lin gave the Trump administration one week to comply with the ruling or explain why funding had not been restored. The administration could also appeal the ruling to the Ninth Circuit.
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