Judge orders hundreds of UCLA grants to be restored

The ruling affects about $81 million of Trump administration cuts to funding.

- BY JAWEED KALEEM

THE BATTLE with UC is part of the Trump administration's drive to remake higher education, which it sees as a bastion of liberalism.

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore hundreds of UCLA science research grants that were abruptly frozen to punish the university over campus antisemitism findings, a ruling that is the first legal test of whether a wider funding freeze will pass court muster.

In a late Tuesday decision, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California said the government's latest slashing of UCLA funds violated her June order blocking National Science Foundation research grant terminations throughout the 10-campus system.

She told the Trump administration to file an update by Aug. 19 detailing whether it had restored the grants and if not, "an explanation of why it was not feasible and a description of the steps that have been taken thus far."

The class-action case was filed independently by UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley professors fighting a separate, earlier round of Trump administration science grant clawbacks. The ruling affects only a portion of the recent UCLA cuts, about 300 NSF grants totaling $81 million out of $584 million in suspensions. Hundreds of grants from the National Institutes of Health and Department of Energy are still on hold.

Lin's ruling lands amid a high-stakes conflict involving the nation's premier public university system, the Trump administration and increasingly strident statements from Gov. Gavin Newsom, who has warned that California leaders will "never bend the knee" to federal demands. The administration is seeking a $1-billion fine and a host of additional concessions to resolve federal antisemitism findings against the university.