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A federal judge in California today ordered<\/a> the Trump administration to restore 500 National Institutes of Health grants that it suspended at UCLA in July<\/a> over accusations the campus tolerates antisemitism.<\/p>\n Judge Rita Lin\u2019s decision<\/a> provides researchers at the university a major respite as UCLA and University of California leaders contend with Trump\u2019s demands for a $1.2 billion settlement over a litany of accusations, including that the campus permits antisemitism. It\u2019s a claim that more than 600 Jewish members<\/a> of the University of California community in a public letter say is \u201cmisguided and punitive.\u201d Meanwhile, UCLA\u2019s leadership highlighted its efforts to combat antisemitism\u00a0<\/a>days before Trump\u2019s settlement demands.<\/p>\n \u201cCutting off hundreds of millions of research funds will do nothing to make UCLA safer for Jews nor diminish antisemitism in the world,\u201d the public letter signed by UC Jewish professors, students, staff and alumni says.<\/p>\n Last week several UC faculty groups and unions sued to halt<\/a> the administration from pursuing its settlement demands, describing them as an \u201cunlawful threat of federal funding cuts\u201d to \u201cillegally coerce the UC into suppressing free speech and academic freedom rights.\u201d<\/p>\n Lin\u2019s decision follows her string of orders since June that have restored hundreds of other UC research grants from multiple agencies. Her injunction is preliminary; the trial is ongoing.<\/p>\n Today\u2019s action restores virtually all of the 800 UCLA science grants the government froze in July \u2014 a value of more than $500 million. Lin\u2019s order today of restoring 500 National Institutes of Health grants follows her decision last month that 300 National Science Foundation grants suspended in July be restored. The federal government complied with her August order by reversing the freezes<\/a>.<\/p>\n The science grants pay for research into life-saving drugs, dementia, heart disease in rural areas, robotics education and a whole gamut of science inquiries across the country. They help fuel the country\u2019s research enterprise and are the top source of federal research grants at the UC. The UC system has battled the Trump administration over various efforts to slash its funding since President Donald Trump\u2019s second term began<\/a>. The science funding is also a key source of income and training for graduate students, who are the next generation of publicly funded academics<\/a>.<\/p>\n Lin\u2019s latest order also restores three Department of Transportation grants and an unknown number of Department of Defense grants that the Trump administration terminated this year.<\/p>\n Lin gave lawyers for the Trump administration until Sept. 29 to submit a report confirming that they complied with her orders to restore the grants.<\/p>\n How we got here<\/p>\n In June, Lin issued a preliminary injunction, later upheld<\/a> by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, that ordered the Trump administration to restore 114 National Science Foundation grants and several dozen other grants from the Environmental Protection Agency and National Endowment for the Humanities at all UC campuses.<\/p>\n Then in August, Lin sided with the lawyers for the researchers in undoing the funding freezes for the 300 National Science Foundation grants. The lawyers argued that the Trump administration\u2019s surprising decision in late July to suspend those grants violated Lin\u2019s June injunction.<\/p>\n Lin\u2019s latest order similarly says that the federal government violated her June preliminary injunction when it suspended the 500 National Institutes of Health grants at UCLA, also in late July. Core to her rationale is that the science agencies terminated UC grants en masse, in violation of a law, the Administrative Procedure Act, that requires federal agencies to explain in individual detail why the grants were terminated. Her rationale echoes other federal district court rulings about grant terminations.<\/p>\n How this relates to recent Supreme Court decision<\/p>\n Lin\u2019s decision also creates a potential opening for other researchers seeking to challenge their grant terminations after an August U.S. Supreme Court decision seemingly made that process harder.<\/p>\n In that decision, the high court said the right venue to sue to get a defunded grant restored is the little-known Court of Federal Claims<\/a>, not a traditional district court. A slim majority of justices said that plaintiffs need to argue in the Court of Federal Claims to get their money back while they argue in a traditional district court to challenge the policy that led to the grant\u2019s termination in the first place.<\/p>\n But Lin concluded that that Supreme Court decision can\u2019t apply to the UC researchers because of a quirk in who can file suit in the Court of Federal Claims. Because research grants are contracts between a university and the federal government, only universities have \u201cstanding\u201d to bring a suit to the Court of Federal Claims. The Supreme Court decision didn\u2019t take on the issue of individuals, Lin wrote, but the high court justices still believed plaintiffs should have some way to argue that their funding should be restored.<\/p>\n Here\u2019s how Lin\u2019s order creates an opening: Lawyers for the federal government argued to Lin that because the plaintiffs are individual UC researchers and not the UC campuses themselves, they can\u2019t sue at all to restore their grant funding. But Lin balked at that rationale at the Thursday hearing and in her written order Monday.<\/p>\n \u201cThe district courts are the only forum where the UC researchers could defend their constitutional and statutory rights, and the Ninth Circuit has already determined that they may bring their claims here. This Court will not shut its doors to them,\u201d Lin wrote.<\/p>\n She added in her written order that the lawyers for the federal government presented an \u201cextreme\u201d view that the researchers couldn\u2019t sue anywhere, even in the hypothetical scenario in which the federal government terminated \u201cthe federal funding of all Black researchers, or every researcher with an Asian last name \u2014 and the researchers would have nowhere to sue to undo those wrongs, unless their universities decided to sue in the Court of Federal Claims.\u201d<\/p>\n What the Trump administration has argued<\/p>\n In justifying the grant suspensions in July, the National Science Foundation<\/a> and National Institutes of Health<\/a> each sent UCLA letters accusing the university of using race-based admissions, allowing transgender women to compete in women\u2019s sports and not doing enough to address antisemitism on its campus.<\/p>\n But California barred public campuses from admitting students based on race in 1996 when voters through a ballot measure ended the practice. Representatives from the two science agencies wrote in July that though UCLA maintains it doesn\u2019t use affirmative action, its \u201cholistic review\u201d admissions process is de-facto race-based admissions.<\/p>\n The letter from the National Science Foundation said the agency believes that \u201cUCLA\u2019s \u2018holistic review\u2019 admissions process, which considers factors such as an applicant\u2019s neighborhood\/zip code, family income, and school profile \u2014 and invites the disclosure of an applicant\u2019s race via personal statements \u2014 is a transparent attempt to engage in race-based admissions in all but name.\u201d The letter from the National Institutes of Health was virtually identical.<\/p>\n While the Supreme Court in 2023 overturned the use of race in college admissions in a 6-3 decision, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that students are free to discuss their identities and how they overcame hardships in admissions essays.<\/p>\n \u201cNothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant\u2019s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise,\u201d Roberts wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n All three criticisms in the agencies\u2019 July letters match<\/a> the<\/a> policies<\/a> Trump is pursuing through executive actions to reshape higher education and the federal government. They also mirror the policy playbook fleshed out in Project 2025<\/a>, a conservative publication that has shaped Trump\u2019s current term in office<\/a>.<\/p>\n UCLA addresses antisemitism<\/p>\n The UCLA grant suspensions followed a federal Department of Justice report in July<\/a> that accused the campus of not doing enough to address antisemitism, particularly related to events during last year\u2019s pro-Palestine protests and encampment. The report came months after UCLA commissioned a task force to investigate antisemitism on campus and come up with recommendations that UCLA leaders said they\u2019d implement<\/a>.<\/p>\n Students and faculty protesting Israel\u2019s war in Gaza have themselves accused UCLA of bias against them, including Arab, Muslim and Jewish UCLA community members<\/a>.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s settlement demand \u201cdoes not make Jewish students safer,\u201d the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California said in a statement<\/a> last month. The advocacy group is composed of 39 organizations that offer family services, political advocacy, immigration legal aid and other services.<\/p>\n