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

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to resume hundreds of suspended UCLA scientific research grants on Tuesday, affecting more than one-third of the total awards that the administration suddenly frozen late last month.

U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin issued a hours-long order after a San Francisco court hearing, saying the government’s funding cuts to UCLA violated her June domination to prevent the termination of scientific research grants.

Lin, of the northern California region, wrote that the National Science Foundation “has suspended grants here.”

She ordered the Trump administration to submit an update by August 19 detailing whether it restored the grant and, if not, “explained why it was not feasible and a description of the steps taken so far.”

The case – filed independently by a group of UC professors, is the first legal test of whether the UCLA mass grant suspension will pass the court.

The Trump administration has frozen more than a billion dollars in science, medicine and other federal grants on suspicion of discrimination against the university’s admissions and failure to “promote a research environment without anti-Semitism.”

UCLA suspension covers research funded by NSF, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy. They include research in areas such as cancer, neurobiology, and clean energy.

A UC spokesman said in a statement Tuesday that recovery funds will be “critical” for the university.

“While we have no chance to review the court orders and have not participated in the lawsuit, restoring the National Science Foundation funding is crucial to studying the performances represented by the University of California and the country.”

An NSF spokesperson did not respond to the New York Times inquiry.

Claudia Polsky, a law professor at UC Berkeley, who represented researchers in the case, said in an interview that she hoped the results would help UCLA “boycott” the Trump administration’s cuts and demanded that the university pay $1 billion to restore grants.

“Hundreds of UCLA researchers can now return to the lab, return to the field, and re-execute tasks,” said Polsky, who works with Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law School, and San Francisco law firm Lieff Cabraser. “Further: With hundreds of orders of moratoriums on grants, UCLA should have much more leverage than this morning’s boycott of the Trump administration’s request to mistakenly use the study hostages for political transactions.”

The case was earlier than July at UCLA awarded freeze

The order issued Tuesday was only related to NSF grants, which accounted for approximately UCLA frozen orders. NIH and hundreds of other suspensions from the Department of Energy are not affected.

In cases filed by the University of California, the court challenge did not file a lawsuit. Instead, it filed a two-month-old class action lawsuit filed by researchers at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley.

Questions at Tuesday’s hearings were whether cutting NSF grants violated Lin’s June court order, which prevented the termination of scientific funding from many UC researchers across the nine campus systems.

UC professors funded by the NSF, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Humanities Foundation filed a lawsuit that they face layoffs as their grants appear in federal keyword searches for the administration with President Trump’s program to expel diversity, equity and inclusion.

They also said that by using common form letters without explanation, their funds were removed. They believe federal law requires government officials to mention the reasons why funds that have been approved through the competition application process were cancelled.

Lin said she tended to agree with the researchers’ arguments as the case proceeded. She issued a preliminary ban on June 23.

What happened to the hearing on Tuesday

Lin challenged Trump administration lawyers on Tuesday to explain why UCLA’s new science cuts did not violate her earlier court orders.

“Two weeks ago, the NSF went out and again used form letters to cut funding from UCLA en Masse researchers,” Lin said. She asked the Justice Department attorney what was a distance from the lawyers she ordered from the latest cuts.

The government lawyer replied that the fund freeze was a “suspended” rather than a “termination”, which was the subject of Lin’s previous ruling.

“If it was a suspension, then the court’s injunction would not cover it,” said Justice Department attorney Jason Altabet.

Another Justice Department attorney, Michael Velchik, argued that the recent grants were cut so much that it could not be considered a “termination.”

“A week for the court, there is not enough time for a week to rule that a week suspension is a fact that it is terminated,” Velchik said.

Lin disagreed with the order after the hearing.

“The NSF’s indefinite suspension is only different from the termination of the name,” she wrote.

Lin later added: “To avoid doubt, the court also clarified the grant of ‘terminated’ as the term is used in the preliminary injunction, covering the reduction of grant funds on a long-term or indefinite basis conducted by UCLA on July 30 at the NSF of UCLA.

Administration lawyers also said the Trump administration has not frozen all grants to UCLA, but has retained some “critical” and “important” grants.

They did not specify which grants or how much. The answer is to answer Lin’s question of whether the government abused the grants, which led her to terminate the termination earlier in the summer.

Chemerinsky, the president of law at UC Berkeley, held an oral debate on behalf of researchers.

Chemerinsky said in court that the UCLA cuts amounted to “the kind of termination that the court ordered before.”

For researchers, the terms “pause” and “termination” are the same, he said.

“They can’t pay rent anymore, they can’t pay graduates anymore, and they can’t pay postdoctoral anymore,” Chemerinsky said. “There’s no difference.”

Professor Berkeley accused the administration of “grasping all personal grants and trying to force UCLA to settle.”

Velchik disagrees.

“The government has legal and real concerns about what happened at UCLA,” he said, who said the university has “severe and terrible” anti-Semitism and referred to allegations of “racial preference” at UCLA Medical School.

The Trump administration has requested more than $1 billion from the University of California to restore more than $5 billion in UCLA funding. The administration also asked UCLA to agree to radically change campus changes related to protest rules, gender identity, admission data sharing and other areas.

UC leaders say they are willing to negotiate, but the current term is “unacceptable.” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Trump asked for an attempt to “ranspeckle” and “ransom” and said he wanted to sue.

The UC board of directors held an emergency meeting at UCLA on Monday and has not announced the lawsuit.