No deal, no defiance: UC's Trump fight grinds on, leaving UCLA in limbo

Source: Politico

12/28/2025 04:00 PM EST


President Donald Trump spent a good part of the year trying to bend elite universities to his will, cutting off federal funds as leverage. The assault left schools with a choice: Surrender or fight.

But since the president put the University of California in his cross hairs, school officials have charted a decidedly different course. They have neither conceded defeat nor mounted a vigorous defense. Instead, they are watching as UC faculty members wage their own legal challenges against Trump, scoring early wins that so far have restored more than $580 million in scientific research funding the Trump administration stripped from UCLA.

With UC officials taking little overt action to resolve the crisis, the fight over UCLA funding has not progressed much in the months since it kicked off in July. While other high profile schools around the U.S. have either hammered out deals with the government to get Trump off their backs or dug in for protracted legal battles, UCLA goes into the new year with its future stuck in a seemingly open-ended limbo state.

“There’s no evidence that any type of deal with the United States is going to be happening in the immediate future,” Abhishek Kambli, a Justice Department lawyer, said during a November court hearing in San Francisco.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/12/28/uc-facultys-fight-with-trump-has-put-the-university-in-a-tough-spot-00694193