a group of UC professors<\/a> \u2014 is the first legal test of whether massive grant suspensions at UCLA will pass court muster. <\/p>\nThe Trump administration froze $584 million in science, medical and other federal grants, citing the university\u2019s alleged discrimination in admissions and failure to \u201cpromote a research environment free of antisemitism.\u201d<\/p>\n
The UCLA freezes cover research funded by the NSF, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy. They include studies into areas such as cancer, neurobiology and clean energy.<\/p>\n
Spokespeople for the NSF, UC and UCLA did not immediately reply to requests for comment late Tuesday. <\/p>\n
Case predates major UCLA grant freezes in July<\/p>\n
The order issued Tuesday is related only to NSF grants, which make up about 300 of those frozen at UCLA. Hundreds of other suspended grants from the NIH and Energy Department are not affected.<\/p>\n
The court challenge did not come in a case filed by the University of California, which has not sued over the cuts. Instead, it came in a 2-month-old class-action lawsuit filed by researchers at UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley.<\/p>\n
At question during the Tuesday hearing was whether cuts to NSF grants were illegal under Lin\u2019s June court order that blocked science funding terminations to many UC researchers throughout the nine-campus system.<\/p>\n
UC professors funded by the NSF, Environmental Protection Agency and National Endowment for the Humanities had sued, arguing they faced cuts because their grants appeared in federal keyword searches related to race amid President Trump\u2019s push to rid the government of diversity, equity and inclusion programs. <\/p>\n
They also argued their funding was removed through the use of generic form letters with no explanation. They argued federal law requires that government officials cite the reasons why money already approved through a competitive applications process was taken away.<\/p>\n
Lin said she was inclined to agree with researcher arguments while the case proceeded. She issued a preliminary injunction June 23.<\/p>\n
What happened at Tuesday\u2019s hearing<\/p>\n
On Tuesday, Lin challenged Trump administration lawyers to explain why the new sciencecuts at UCLA did not violate her earlier court order.<\/p>\n
\u201cTwo weeks ago, NSF went out and, again, used form letters to cut off findings to researchers at UCLA en masse,\u201d Lin said. She asked Justice Department lawyers what set apart the most recent cuts from previous ones she enjoined.<\/p>\n
Government lawyers said the newest UCLA cuts were different for two reasons. First, they said, the funding freezes were \u201csuspensions,\u201d not \u201cterminations,\u201d which were the subject of Lin\u2019s earlier ruling.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf it is a suspension, then it is not covered under the court\u2019s injunction,\u201d said Justice Department lawyer Jason Altabet.<\/p>\n
Another Justice Department lawyer, Michael Velchik, argued that the grants had been cut so recently that they could not be viewed as \u201cterminations.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cA week is certainly not enough time for this court to adjudicate that a suspension of one week is de facto a termination,\u201d Velchik said.<\/p>\n
In her Tuesday order, Lin disagreed.<\/p>\n
\u201cNSF\u2019s indefinite suspensions differ from a termination in name only,\u201d she wrote. <\/p>\n
Lin later added: \u201cFor avoidance of doubt, the court also clarifies that grant \u2018termination,\u2019 as the term is used in the preliminary Injunction, encompasses circumstances where grant funding is cut off on a long-term or indefinite basis, like the suspensions carried out by NSF on July 30\u201d at UCLA.<\/p>\n
The government lawyers also said the Trump administration did not freeze all grants to UCLA but spared some that were \u201ccritical\u201d and \u201cimportant.\u201d<\/p>\n
They did not elaborate on which or how many grants those were. This answer came in response to Lin\u2019s questions about whether the government was indiscriminately cutting grants \u2014 an issue that led her to block terminations in June.<\/p>\n
Representing UC researchers was UC Berkeley law school Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. <\/p>\n
Chemerinsky said that the UCLA cuts amounted to \u201cexactly the kind of en masse terminations that the court enjoined previously.\u201d<\/p>\n
For researchers, he said, the terms \u201csuspension\u201d and \u201ctermination\u201d are the same.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey can no longer pay rent, no longer pay graduate students, no longer pay postdocs. There is no difference,\u201d Chemerinsky said. <\/p>\n
The Berkeley professor accused the government of \u201cholding hostage all the individual grants to try to coerce UCLA into a settlement.\u201d<\/p>\n
Velchik disagreed.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere are legitimate and bona fide concerns that the government has with the conduct that has taken place at UCLA,\u201d he said, saying the university has had \u201cgross and horrific\u201d antisemitism and also mentioning allegations of \u201cracial preferences\u201d at the UCLA medical school.<\/p>\n
The Trump administration has demanded more than $1 billion from the University of California to restore the more than half a billion dollars in UCLA funds. The government is also asking UCLA to agree to sweeping campus changes over protest rules, gender identity, admissions-data sharing and other areas. <\/p>\n
UC leaders say that they are willing to negotiate but that the current terms are \u201cunacceptable.\u201d Gov. Gavin Newsom has called the Trump demands an attempt at \u201cextortion\u201d and \u201cransom,\u201d saying he wants to sue.<\/p>\n
The UC Board of Regents, which held an emergency meeting at UCLA on Monday, has not announced a suit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to restore hundreds of suspended UCLA science research grants,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":141396,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[84257,4565,454,6139,4572,84255,50,84256,26298,76407,10062,4352,5618,2501,84258,67,132,4280,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-141395","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"category-us","9":"tag-court-challenge","10":"tag-cut","11":"tag-government","12":"tag-grant","13":"tag-hundred","14":"tag-lin","15":"tag-news","16":"tag-nsf","17":"tag-researcher","18":"tag-suspension","19":"tag-termination","20":"tag-trump-administration","21":"tag-tuesday","22":"tag-ucla","23":"tag-ucla-research-grant","24":"tag-united-states","25":"tag-unitedstates","26":"tag-university","27":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115019431595230061","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141395","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141395\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/141396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}