Trump administration restores research grants to UCLA following federal judge's order

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The Trump administration has restored almost all of the 500 National Institutes of Health grants it suspended at UCLA in July in response to a federal judge’s order last week.

Attorneys in the U.S. Department of Justice submitted a court-mandated update on the status of the grant restorations Monday evening. They report that the National Institutes of Health, or NIH, has restored all but nine grants to UCLA health science researchers, though that figure may be even smaller.

In response to a similar court order in August, the federal National Science Foundation restored 300 grants it had suspended in July.

The restorations cap a remarkable turnaround for UCLA, which lost access to more than $500 million in research in July after the Trump administration froze 800 science grants to the esteemed public university. The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health accused UCLA of tolerating antisemitism as part of their justification for the grant funding freezes. Those claims followed months of efforts at the university to implement the recommendations of a task force on antisemitism that campus administrators appointed to examine bias at the school.

The science grants pay for research into life-saving drugs, dementia, heart disease in rural areas, robotics education and a vast array of science inquiries across the country. They help propel the country’s research enterprise and are the top source of federal research grants at the University of California. The UC system has battled the Trump administration over various efforts to slash its funding since President Donald Trump’s second term began. Science funding is also a key source of income and training for graduate students, who are the next generation of publicly funded academics. Still, UCLA and the rest of the UC remain in the hot seat as the system contends with settlement demands from Trump that amount to $1.2 billion. Trump sought that settlement over a litany of accusations, including that the campus tolerates antisemitism.

More than 600 Jewish faculty, students, staff and alumni of the University of California wrote in a public letter that stripping funding in response to those claims is “misguided and punitive.”

“Cutting off hundreds of millions of research funds will do nothing to make UCLA safer for Jews nor diminish antisemitism in the world,” the public letter says. A coalition of UC faculty and staff have sued to halt Trump from pursuing his settlement demands. The California federal judge who ordered the grants returned to UCLA, Rita Lin, has issued a string of decisions since June that have restored hundreds of other research grants from multiple agencies across the UC system. Her injunction last week is preliminary and the trial is ongoing. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld some of her other preliminary injunctions that forced the Trump administration to restore scores of science, humanities and environmental research grants.

Lin last week also ordered the Department of Defense and Department of Transportation to restore grants to at least several dozen UC researchers, not just those at UCLA. Attorneys for the government say they need more time — until Oct. 10 — to bring back the defense grants, but said funding for all the terminated defense grants will be restored. Lin is also the judge in the Trump settlement lawsuit.

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This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.