Trump administration restores research grants to UCLA following federal
judge's order
[October 01, 2025]
By MIKHAIL ZINSHTEYN/CalMatters
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.
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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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