Judge orders Trump administration to partially restore UCLA research funding

Source: Politico

08/12/2025 10:23 PM EDT

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration on Tuesday to restore some of the funding it cut from the University of California, Los Angeles in late July, handing a partial victory to the UC system as it faces a $1 billion settlement demand from the White House over alleged antisemitism on campus.

It was not immediately clear how much money would be returned to the campus. The ruling is only expected to apply to around 300 grants from the National Science Foundation out of the roughly 800 awards the Trump administration suspended, totaling $584 million, from the NSF, National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy.

Judge Rita F. Lin of the Northern District Court of California had already sided with the UC in June when she barred the National Science Foundation from terminating additional grants to UC researchers. In her ruling Tuesday, Lin said the foundation had violated that order by cutting off funding to UCLA and ordered any suspended grants by the agency between July 30 and Aug. 12 to be restored.

The Trump administration last week demanded that UCLA pay a $1 billion fine to resolve alleged civil rights violations and agree to sweeping changes to campus protest rules and admissions standards in order to access the grant money. The UC Board of Regents held an emergency meeting Monday on the proposal, President Donald Trump’s latest attempt to force higher education institutions to pay steep penalties for what the White House calls civil rights violations.

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