A federal judge ruled against the Trump administration late Tuesday night, ordering the government to partially restore science funding to UCLA in a major class action lawsuit filed by researchers from the University of California school system.
U.S. District Judge Rita Lin ordered the National Science Foundation to reinstate suspended grants to UCLA, following a hearing on the case earlier that day over what the plaintiffs describe as the Trump administration’s “arbitrary, capricious, and unlawful” termination of research grants. She gave the Trump administration one week to show that it is complying with the order.
The decision comes weeks after the Trump administration suspended some $584 million in federal grants for the school, roughly a third of which are from NSF, due to claims of inadequate handling of antisemitism on campus. The funding freeze, Lin wrote, was in violation of a preliminary injunction on science grant terminations that she had handed down in June.
The University of California school system said in a statement to NBC News that the development was a positive one.
“While we have not had an opportunity to review the court’s order and were not party to the suit, restoration of National Science Foundation funds is critical to research the University of California performs on behalf of California and the nation,” the statement said.
The White House did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment.
The funding from the NSF could be worth over an estimated $101 million, across 306 grant projects, based on data maintained by Grant Witness, a project spearheaded by a group of researchers and volunteers that tracks the termination of grants of scientific research agencies under the Trump administration.
Lin’s ruling follows the Trump administration’s allegations that UCLA had violated federal civil rights law by acting with “deliberate indifference in creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students.” To restore funding, the administration proposed a $1 billion settlement with UCLA last week.
While the Trump administration argued in the Tuesday hearing that the UCLA cuts were “suspensions” rather than “terminations,” Lin wrote in her ruling that the difference in wording still produced the same effect.
“NSF claims that it could simply turn around the day after the Preliminary Injunction issued, and halt funding on every grant that had been ordered reinstated, so long as that action was labeled as a ‘suspension’ rather than a ‘termination,’” she wrote. “This is not a reasonable interpretation of the scope of the Preliminary Injunction.”
The class action lawsuit was filed in early June, and accused the Trump administration of unlawfully terminating or suspending previously approved grants in a series of cuts implemented through controversial then-Elon Musk headed agency the Department of Government Efficiency. The plaintiffs alleged in the suit that the mass termination of grants, without individual review or due process, violated administrative laws. A review of the grants terminated across the UC system by NSF, for example, appears to have taken place because the grant titles included the “now-suspect DEI-related words” like “equity,” the suit said.
Claudia Polsky, a UC Berkeley law professor who spearheaded the class action lawsuit, praised the ruling.
“Judge Lin readily understood that the suspension actions, like the prior terminations she had enjoined, unlawfully failed to contain grant-specific rationales for halting grants mid-stream,” Polsky said in an email. “NSF nowhere considered researchers’ reliance on the grants, nor the waste of public money from abandoning research prior to completion.”
