A district judge ruled on Thursday that the Trump administration must restore part of the $584 million in funding it froze from the University of California, Los Angeles.
The ruling is the result of a class action lawsuit filed by researchers at the University of California system.
Rita Lin, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, ruled that the National Science Foundation’s suspension of funds from UCLA violated a preliminary injunction from June barring the foundation from terminating grants to UC research projects.
The foundation is an independent U.S. agency.
The district judge didn’t find the Trump administration’s argument compelling—that it was suspending but not terminating funding. She wrote that the suspensions were indefinite, and the foundation didn’t provide a “grant-specific explanation,” as it was required.
She required all parties to provide a status update by Aug. 19. The U.S. Justice Department declined to comment.
Claudia Polsky, a clinical law professor at UC Berkeley and an attorney for the researchers, told JNS that Lin’s ruling “reinstated 300 National Science Foundation grants.” The value of the restored amount is $81 million, according to The New York Times.
“We are hopeful this ruling emboldens UCLA in its interactions with the Trump administration, such that research grants are not held hostage in discussion of utterly unrelated issues,” she said.
Roger Wakimoto, vice chancellor for research and creative activities at UCLA, stated that the foundation reinstated UCLA awards suspended on Aug. 1, but not suspended National Institutes of Health and U.S. Department of Energy funds.
“We are working to reinstate the additional suspended grants,” Wakimoto said.
Although the university system wasn’t part of the suit, “restoration of National Science Foundation funds is critical to research the University of California performs on behalf of California and the nation,” Stett Holbrook, associate director of strategic and critical communications for the university system president, told JNS.
Last week, the Trump administration offered to settle its probe of Jew-hatred at the university system for $1 billion, according to the university. James Milliken, the president of the UC system, stated that it would “completely devastate” the public school system.
The class action lawsuit was initially filed in June, and attorneys for the plaintiffs argued on Aug. 4 that the foundation’s suspension of grants to UCLA violated the injunction.
Polsky told JNS that there were six plaintiffs when the lawsuit was first filed, but the number of plaintiffs “is in process of expansion.”
As a class action lawsuit, it effectively represents “thousands of similarly situated researchers across the 10 UC campuses,” Polsky said.
