A federal judge on Monday ordered the Trump administration to restart the flow of about $500 million in funding for scientific research it withheld from the University of California, Los Angeles, sparing the university for now from a devastating fiscal blow.
While only temporary, the ruling issued by U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin in San Francisco was a significant victory for UCLA and the rest of the sprawling UC system, which has been caught up in a campaign by federal officials to punish high profile universities for what President Donald Trump and other conservatives allege was their overly permissive response to student protests over Israel’s war in Gaza and failure to address antisemitism on their campuses.
In the withholding of research funds, the administration found a potent source of leverage to extract concessions from schools. Columbia University, the first major school to land in Trump’s crosshairs, ultimately agreed to pay the government $200 million and make a series of reforms to get back $400 million in research grants that the government withheld over claims the school violated the civil rights of Jewish students and faculty. Other schools also reached agreements, while Harvard University remains locked in negotiations over $2 billion in funding.
The Trump administration eventually turned its attention west to California’s elite network of 10 UC campuses, which enroll 300,000 students and employ leading researchers in a wide array of scientific areas. The administration launched investigations into UC Berkeley over claims of antisemitism on campus and a Republican-led congressional education committee began probing alleged antisemitism at UCSF and UCLA. In late July, it slashed over $580 million in research grants from UCLA, alleging Jewish students and faculty had been subjected to abuse and discrimination during pro-Palestinian protests. It also accused the school of improperly considering race when deciding on which students to admit.
Justice Department officials followed up with a set of demands: UCLA would have to pay $1 billion and make changes to the admissions process and other policies in exchange for the return of the research money.
The university has not agreed to the settlement proposal and the Board of Regents, which oversees the UC system, is continuing to discuss how best to navigate the situation behind closed doors.
The UCLA funds were wrapped into a lawsuit a group of researchers from multiple UC campuses filed challenging the Trump administration’s weaponization of research funds. The lawsuit contends that the grant terminations were unconstitutional because they were cut “without proper review or clear explanation.” Lin issued a preliminary injunction in June temporarily restoring funding cuts from three government agencies, which the plaintiffs later sought to expand to cover the frozen UCLA grants.
Lin, a judge in the Northern District Court of California, said in her ruling Monday that the indefinite suspensions of NIH grants were “likely arbitrary and capricious” and in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, a federal law that lays out how administrative agencies must operate.
Justice officials could not be reached immediately for comment after Lin issued her ruling late Monday.
“This ruling in researchers’ favor is very consequential in this moment when the Trump Administration is applying maximum political pressure to UCLA,” said Claudia Polsky, director of the environmental law clinic at UC Berkeley and an attorney for the plaintiffs. “The effect of reinstating all unlawfully suspended NIH grants to UCLA would be to give campus and the regents the leverage they need to resist and to uphold the rule of law.”
Lin in August had already ordered the Trump administration to release $81 million in funding the National Science Foundation withheld from UCLA, ruling that the foundation had violated an injunction she issued barring it from terminating additional grants. The government appealed and days later a federal appeals court sided with UC researchers.
In her ruling Monday, Lin ordered research funds from the National Institutes of Health, Department of Defense, and Department of Transportation be restored as part of her preliminary injunction. The bulk of the money had been held back from UCLA, but other UC campuses will see funds return as well. While a final decision on whether the government should be allowed to freeze funding as the lawsuit plays out will be made later, Lin’s ruling Monday means money should begin flowing again to researchers who have been trying to navigate through uncertainty.
Tracy Johnson, dean of UCLA’s Division of Life Sciences, has had several NIH grants for her department cut off — including funding to help train students on researching muscle cell biology and finding a cure for muscular dystrophy.
“Neither paying $1 billion dollars, nor this existing state of grant suspension — neither are sustainable for the research and the science at UCLA,” Johnson said. “I just shudder to think about what happens in either scenario: Either funding is not restored, or that there’s a billion dollars that gets paid by the university.”
Lin, during a hearing on Thursday, said that the funding cuts from the three agencies “really all suffer from kind of the same fundamental sin that they were done through unreasoned mass terminations” that did not undergo the “required factors that the agency is supposed to consider.”
Lin is also presiding over a separate lawsuit filed on Tuesday by the American Association of University Professors and other unions, which are suing the administration over using civil rights laws to exert control over the UC system and seeking legal relief from financial actions.
In August, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to slash more than $780 million in NIH grants to various universities because they allegedly promoted diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives the president has decried as being part of liberal “woke” thinking. Jason Altabet, a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Justice, cited the high court’s ruling during the hearing Thursday before Lin and a concurring opinion by Justice Amy Coney Barrett that stated federal grant terminations should be filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which handles disputes over government contracts.
But Lin appeared skeptical, arguing that individual researchers, who are third parties to the contracts, would have to rely on the UC to sue on their behalf in the federal claims court. Absent the university stepping in, Lin indicated, the researchers would have no recourse for contesting the cuts.
“The district courts are the only forum where the UC researchers could defend their constitutional and statutory rights, and the Ninth Circuit has already determined that they may bring their claims here,” Lin wrote in Monday’s ruling. “This Court will not shut its doors to them.”
When Altabet was presented with a hypothetical scenario of a researcher who had their grant terminated on the grounds they had an Asian last name, he conceded the researcher would be powerless to file a lawsuit. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law and an attorney for the researchers, called the government’s position “astounding.”
“Imagine that some presidential administration simply decided to terminate all of the grants to Black individuals, or you say all with Asian names,” Chemerinsky said. “It can’t be that no court would have jurisdiction to provide relief to the individuals, because there wasn’t an officially announced policy with regard to it.”
