Dive Brief:
- A federal judge on Monday ordered the National Institutes of Health to temporarily restore the research grant funding it abruptly cut from the University of California, Los Angeles under President Donald Trump.
- The order was part of a broader preliminary injunction from U.S. District Judge Rita Lin that also directed the U.S. departments of Defense, Transportation, and Health and Human Services to reinstate all grants they had cut from University of California researchers en masse. She further barred them from making future blanket cuts against the system while an ongoing class-action lawsuit unfolds.
- Researchers and faculty from the system's Berkeley and San Francisco campuses initially sued the Trump administration in June over its wide-ranging grant terminations, arguing they were illegal and threatened U.S. medical and technological advancement.
Dive Insight:
In their request for an injunction in August, the plaintiffs' said NIH cut almost 500 research grants at UCLA. Those funds have been valued at $500 million, according to media reports.
In total, UCLA lost 800 federal research grants in the purge, including from the National Science Foundation and other agencies, according to the lawsuit. In the same case, Lin ordered NSF to restore the cut research grants to UCLA last month. The NSF grants are worth $81 million, local media reported.
Her decision came after the Trump administration suspended $584 million in federal funding to UCLA over allegations the campus broke civil rights law, including by failing to adequately protect Jewish students from harassment.
However, the Trump administration’s cuts have also hit the University of California's nine other research colleges. In one example, the Transportation Department cut a grant worth $12 million to support research on equitable decarbonization at the University of California, Davis. The cancellation also had ripple effects for researchers at the University of California, Riverside, the complaint said.
Lin’s newest ruling expands her previous order in June directing several federal agencies to restore terminated grant funding, writing that the plaintiffs were likely to prove that the mass terminations were unlawful.
In fiscal 2024, the University of California system received roughly $4.1 billion in federal research awards. Of that, $2.7 billion came from HHS, with an overwhelming majority — $2.5 billion — coming from NIH.
The second largest pool of federal funding came from the National Science Foundation, at $525 million.
Lin is overseeing another lawsuit against the Trump administration brought by University of California faculty groups and employee unions. The plaintiffs in that case are seeking to have the federal cuts ruled unconstitutional, arguing they are“arbitrary, ideologically driven, and unlawful use of financial coercion."
