A California federal judge ruled today that Donald Trump cannot demand that UCLA pay a $1.2 billion settlement that would have imposed severe limits on the campus’s academic freedoms and efforts to enroll an economically and culturally diverse student body or risk continued funding freezes on grants the system relies on for research
The decision by Judge Rita Lin is a preliminary injunction and represents a significant victory for University of California scientists, professors, graduate students and other researchers. They and a national professors association sued Trump in September, claiming that his settlement demand — the most sweeping to date in his war on exclusive universities — represents an “unlawful threat” of funding cuts to coerce the university system into “suppressing free speech and academic freedom rights.”
Lin agreed with that assessment, calling Trump’s actions toward the university “coercive and retaliatory.” Her ruling doesn’t just apply to UCLA. It largely ties the hands of the Trump administration to target the rest of the UC system for current and future research grants.
“Agency officials, as well as the President and Vice President, have repeatedly and publicly announced a playbook of initiating civil rights investigations of preeminent universities to justify cutting off federal funding, with the goal of bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune,” Lin wrote in her ruling.
Lin wrote that this same playbook is occurring at the UC.
“With every day that passes, UCLA continues to be denied the chance to win new grants, ratchetting up Defendants’ pressure campaign,” she wrote. “And numerous UC faculty and staff have submitted declarations describing how (the Trump administration’s) actions have already chilled speech throughout the UC system.”
Lawyers for the federal government had argued that a federal court cannot block a federal agency from making a decision that hasn’t occurred yet, such as whether to approve new funding for a pending grant.
“Notably, Plaintiffs’ fears about future grant suspensions and their claims about the likelihood of constitutional violations are entirely based on speculation about an opening settlement offer between the federal government and UC,” U.S. Department of Justice attorneys wrote to Lin.
The legal documents in the case spanned 700 pages and included written testimony from more than 70 UC professors, staff workers and graduate students.
The settlement demand and lawsuit
Trump’s settlement demand is a 27-page document sent to UCLA in early August that would have required the top-ranked public university to hire a senior administrator to review diversity, equity and inclusion efforts; limit campus protest; bar the campus’s medical center from performing gender affirming surgeries or hormone therapy on minors; deny admissions to foreign students with “anti-Western” sentiment and other restrictions.
The public was first able to see the document in late October after some scholars filed a separate lawsuit in state court to force UC officials to disclose the settlement demand.
The settlement demand emerged a few days after the Trump administration froze more than $500 million in health and science research funding to UCLA over allegations that the campus tolerated antisemitism and enrolled students using racial preferences. Had UC agreed to its terms, the Trump administration would have released the frozen funds back to UCLA.
However, months before Trump sought the settlement, UCLA had already taken steps to address antisemitism on campus after its leaders commissioned a task force to recommend ways to create a more welcoming environment for Jewish students.
Lin faulted the administration for disregarding UCLA’s efforts. The agencies did not “mention the remedial steps UCLA had already taken to address the issues described,” Lin wrote.
UCLA is legally barred by state and federal law from admitting students using racial preferences. Trump’s demands would have also blocked UCLA from a practice the U.S. Supreme Court condoned: allowing students to discuss their racial identity in their personal essays.
But almost all of that funding that Trump froze in July had since been restored after a separate wave of legal filings prompted Lin to temporarily undo Trump’s cuts in August and September.
Lin has emerged as a key bulwark for UC researchers as she’s ordered the Trump administration several times to undo hundreds of millions of dollars in science funding cuts to the University of California, including roughly $500 million in science and health grant funding suspensions to UCLA alone. Between June and today, she’s sided with UC researchers and staff four times in rebuffing the Trump administration’s efforts to halt funding to scholars. Her initial ruling that has served as a basis for other preliminary injunctions against Trump was upheld by a panel of judges on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
UC faculty associations, among the plaintiffs in the case, wrote to Lin that some of its members who don’t have tenure and are international scholars now hesitate to teach issues related to Israel and Palestine or lead lessons on the health effects of climate change. Other scholars say they fear taking part in protests or other free speech activity due to fears about the government’s reprisals.
“I am a mother, and the threat of jail time or federal involvement or oversight in campus policing would give me new fear” about protesting, wrote Hannah Appel, an anthropology professor at UC Santa Cruz, in a court document.
Faculty groups also argued that a $1.2 billion hit to UCLA would affect the whole system, as UC leaders would likely pull funding from other campuses to help UCLA absorb the loss. UCLA’s budget is around $13 billion, including its medical and hospital programs, while the UC system’s is more than $50 billion — and a third of that comes from federal sources.
UC President James Milliken called the situation “one of the gravest threats in UC’s 157-year history.”
The ruling and evidence in detail
Lin’s written ruling mirrors the comments she made during a 90-minute hearing last week, in which she said that the Trump administration has told universities, including the UC, that “if you want the funding restored, then agree to change what you teach, change how you handle student protests (and) endorse the administration’s preferred views on gender.”
“Defendants have submitted nothing to refute this,” she said then..
Twenty-one labor unions and faculty associations sued Trump and 15 agencies, including the top providers of science research funding — the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, NASA and the Department of Education that together award the UC more than $4 billion annually. The UC system itself is not part of this suit but has received sustained pressure from students, staff and faculty — including hundreds of Jewish ones — to reject Trump’s settlement.
“This agreement violates the very foundations of higher education,” the UC undergraduate student association wrote to Gov. Gavin Newsom, UC’s president and campus chancellors in November.
Faculty and staff wanted a return of all terminated grants and a block on denying funding to any pending grants that were preliminarily approved by science panels but were stalled for seemingly political reasons.
Other faculty, staff impact
The UC has cut the hours or laid off more than 250 lecturers and librarians since Trump began his term this year, said Katie Rodger, the president of UC-AFT, the union of lecturers and librarians at the UC. Lecturers are a core part of the instructional staff at UC but generally lack guarantees of continuous employment that other professors enjoy.
The federal fiscal picture is a reason why at least some lecturers have received pink slips. The “School of Humanities has incurred budget reductions over the last four years, which have been compounded this year by national and state level budgetary impacts and planning projections indicate substantial future budget shortfalls,” said a termination letter at UC Irvine this past spring.
And while lecturers do not lead labs that receive federal grant funding, they work in them. The loss of grant funding “already has and it will continue to impact us going forward,” Rodger said of lecturers during an interview. The union in August wrote a letter to UC’s director of labor relations leadership demanding that the system cease negotiations with Trump over the settlement.
Meanwhile, the dean of the largest college at the UC — the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis — wrote to faculty last month that it’s dealing with a $20 million budget shortfall across this year and next, after absorbing a loss of $6.7 million the past five years. “Budgets for faculty and graduate student employment will reflect these reductions,” the dean, Estella Atekwana, wrote. That would affect most lecturers.
Several scholars and staffers wrote to Lin that the administration was freezing funding on pending grants that UCLA researchers would have likely received if Trump didn’t target the campus. One of those projects was supposed to go to Marcus Roper, a mathematics and computational medicine professor who submitted a grant to research how to better predict vision loss in adults with diabetes.
The proposal also included a program to teach K-12 students how to apply algebra to analyze eye health. Roper showed in court filings that two grants he submitted won the recommendations of the agency’s program directors, but those were pulled when the Trump administration suspended all of UCLA’s existing NSF and National Institutes of Health grants. Even after Lin ordered Trump to restore the existing grants the agency suspended at UCLA, NSF personnel told Roper they were ordered to pause approval of funding for new grants.
Also at UCLA, the NSF preliminarily approved the renewal grant for a math research program that’s been funded for 25 years, but also pulled it in July. If the program isn’t reupped again, Richard Bartlebaugh, a video producer, will lose his job months before he’s eligible for his pension and the program will close in May of 2026, he wrote to Lin. “In this scenario, my time at (the institute) will have represented a four-year and eleven-month career misstep.”
Trump didn’t follow rules, lawsuit said
Catherine Lhamon, formerly the top official during the Obama and Biden administrations at the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education, wrote to Lin that the way the Trump administration pulled funds was illegal.
“What (the office) cannot do under the law — and what we never did — is move to immediate fund termination.”
But that’s what the administration did. And as Lin noted in her ruling and comments during last week’s hearing, Trump officials bragged about it.
“We’re going to bankrupt these universities, we’re going to take away every single federal dollar,” said Leo Terrell on a FOX News program in March. Terrell heads the Trump administration’s multi-agency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. His interview was submitted by lawyers for the UC workers as evidence. “The academic system in this country has been hijacked by the left, has been hijacked by the Marxists” he also said.
Llamon, who’s now a faculty member at UC Berkeley, wrote that federal law requires the agency to go through a lengthy process of warning a campus of any civil rights violations, such as ones dealing with antisemitism, and allow the campus to come to a settlement with an action plan. Sometimes the Office for Civil Rights leads an investigation at the school and encourages campus leaders to undertake policy changes. All of that occurs before the federal government pulls funding from a school.
While in charge, her office struck deals to combat allegations of antisemitism at numerous universities, including the UC.
“Termination of funds was, as is required in statute and regulation, a last resort, and in the thousands of complaints my office received, we never needed to take this step,” she wrote.