A federal judge Monday ordered the Trump administration to restore $500 million in UCLA medical research grants, halting for now a nearly two-month funding crisis that UC leaders said threatened the future of the nation’s premier public university system.
The opinion by U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District of California added hundreds of UCLA’s National Institutes of Health grants to an ongoing class-action lawsuit that already led to the reversal of tens of millions of dollars in grants from the National Science Foundation, Environmental Protection Agency, National Endowment for the Humanities and other federal agencies to the University of California.
Lin’s order provides the biggest relief to UCLA but affects federal funding awarded to all 10 UC campuses. Lin ruled that the NIH grants were suspended by form letters that were unspecific to the research, a likely violation of the Administrative Procedure Act, which regulates executive branch rulemaking.
In addition to the medical grant freezes — which had prompted talks of possible UCLA layoffs or closures of labs conducting cancer and stroke research, among other studies — Lin said the government would have to restore millions of Department of Defense and Department of Transportation grants to UC schools.
Lin explained her thinking during a hearing last week. She said the Trump administration committed a “fundamental sin” in its “un-reasoned mass terminations” of grants using “letters that don’t go through the required factors that the agency is supposed to consider.”
The preliminary injunction will be in place as the lawsuit proceeds. But in broadening the case, Lin agreed with plaintiffs that there would be irreparable harm if the suspensions were not immediately reversed.
The suit was originally filed in June by UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley professors fighting a separate, earlier round of Trump administration grant clawbacks. UCLA faculty with NIH grants later joined the case.
The University of California is not a party in the suit.
The judge, a Biden appointee, told Department of Justice lawyers to make a court filing by Sept. 29 explaining “all steps” the government has take to comply with her order or, if necessary, explain why restoring grants “was not feasible.”
UC did not immediately respond Monday to a request for comment about the ruling.
Spokespeople for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, and the Department of Justice did not respond to questions from The Times about the government’s next steps. The Trump administration had appealed an earlier ruling in the case to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Last month, the appeals court declined to reverse that ruling by Lin.
Prior court orders in the case have resulted in government notices to campuses within days saying that funding will flow again.
“This is wonderful news for UC researchers and should be tremendously consequential in ongoing UC negotiations with the Trump administration,” said Claudia Polsky, a UC Berkeley law professor who is part of the legal team behind the suit. “The restoration of more than half a billion dollars to UCLA in NIH funding alone gives UC the strongest hand it has had yet in resisting unlawful federal demands.”
Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley law school, worked with Polsky and argued the case in front of Lin.
“The judge made clear what she said previously and the 9th Circuit held: The termination of grants was illegal and they must be restored,” he said.
Trump administration lawyers argued against lifting more grant freezes, saying the case was in the wrong jurisdiction.
A Justice Department lawyer, Jason Altabet, said during the hearing last week that instead of a District Court lawsuit filed by faculty, the proper venue would be for UC to file a case in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Altabet based his arguments on a recent Supreme Court ruling that upheld the government’s suspension of $783 million in NIH grants — to universities and research centers throughout the country — in part because the issue, the high court said, was not correctly within the jurisdiction of a lower federal court.
In her Monday opinion, Lin disagreed with the government’s position that professors could not sue in District Court or the federal claims court.
Lin addressed a hypothetical scenario posed to the government in court filings and during last week’s hearing, in which she asked what recourse a faculty member had if “a future administration terminated all grants to researchers with Asian last names.” The government’s position was that there would be none unless the person’s employer, the university, sued, because the grants are given to the institutions, not the researchers.
Writing Monday, Lin called that an “extreme” view. “This court will not shut its doors” on researchers suing over “constitutional and statutory rights,” she wrote.
The Trump administration rescinded $584 million in UCLA grants in late July, citing allegations of campus antisemitism, use of race in admissions and the school’s recognition of transgender identities as its reasons. The awards included $81 million from the National Science Foundation — also restored last month by Lin — and $3 million from the Department of Energy, which is still suspended.
Last month, the government proposed a roughly $1.2-billion fine and demanded wide campus changes over admissions, protest rules, gender-affirming healthcare for minors and the disclosure of internal campus records, among other demands, in exchange for restoring the money.
UCLA has said it made changes in the last year to improve the climate for Jewish communities and does not use race in admissions. Chancellor Julio Frenk has said that defunding medical research “does nothing” to address discrimination allegations. The university displays websites and policies that recognize different gender identities and maintains services for LGBTQ+ communities.
UC leaders said they will not pay the $1.2-billion fine and are negotiating with the Trump administration over its other demands. They have told The Times that many settlement proposals cross the university’s red lines.
The case wasclosely watched by researchers at the Westwood campus, who have cut back on lab hours, reduced operations and considered layoffs as the crisis at UCLA moves toward the two-month mark.
Neil Garg, a professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCLA whose roughly four-year, $2.9 million grant was suspended over the summer, said that “people on the campus will be overjoyed” by the injunction.
“From the scientific side of it, it is incredibly warming to hear that, to see that sort of decision,” said Garg said. “But we will wait and see how things play out.”
Garg’s 19-person lab works on developing new organic chemistry reactions that could have pharmaceutical applications. “We try to invent chemistry that is unknown,” he explained.
No one in Garg’s lab lost jobs after his grant was frozen. After the suspension, Garg sought new funding sources. “I have been very aggressive, as have many of my colleagues, in applying,” he said. “Even if the funds are restored, we don’t know how quickly that will happen or how permanent that is.”
Elle Rathbun, a sixth-year neuroscience doctroal candidate at UCLA, had also lost a roughly $160,000 NIH grant that funded her study of stroke recovery treatment.
“I am really glad that [the suspension] didn’t last more than these two months,” said Rathbun, who hoped grants return “quickly and efficiently” so researchers can “use the money in ways that we desperately need.”
Rathbun said the experience showed her “how incredibly precarious of a situation we are in as researchers. And how quickly our lives and our life’s work can seemingly be upended.”
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