Topline
A federal judge in San Francisco ordered the Trump administration to restore a portion of the University of California, Los Angeles’ (UCLA) federal research grants it had suspended late last month, in an order that comes a week after the White House said it was seeking a $1 billion settlement from the school.
In a Tuesday ruling, Federal Judge Rita Lin said the Trump administration’s decision to slash funding to UCLA violated an earlier ruling by her in June, which prevented the National Science Foundation from blocking science research grant terminations.
In her ruling, Lin criticized the Trump administration for trying to circumvent her order by claiming that they can halt “funding on every grant that had been ordered reinstated, so long as that action was labeled as a ‘suspension’ rather than a ‘termination’”
The ruling then noted, “NSF's actions violate the Preliminary Injunction,” as there was no “principled difference between a ‘termination’ and the immediate, indefinite, and ‘final’ ‘suspension’ of funding in this context.”
The ruling also mentioned that Research projects across the University of California system lost more than $324 million in grant funding as a result of the White House’s cuts.
The university and the White House have not yet commented on the ruling.
This case against the funding cuts was filed by a group of researchers at the university.
The slashing of UCLA’s grants was part of a broader Trump administration crackdown on universities where pro-Palestinian protests took place last year. Late last month, the Justice Department alleged that the UCLA had violated federal civil rights law by failing to act against protests that created a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students. The DOJ accused the university of failing to tackle antisemitism during the demonstrations. As a result, the Trump administration federal funding and grants that UCLA received from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies. The university later confirmed the funding impacted by the cuts totaled around $584 million.
Last week, the White House confirmed to Forbes that it was seeking $1 billion settlement from the university to restore the funding. According to CNN, which first reported on the proposal, the White House informed the university that it was seeking a $1 billion settlement paid to the federal government in multiple installments to restore the funding. Additionally, the government wanted the university to pay a $172 million claims fund to the people impacted by the alleged Civil Rights Act violations. The proposed settlement is significantly larger than the ones the Trump administration has reached with other universities like Columbia and Brown.
Trump Pursues Record $1 Billion Settlement From UCLA Over Antisemitism Claims (Forbes)