Federal agencies illegally canceled nearly $2 billion of research grants to UC professors based on keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19 used to screen for projects that ran afoul of Trump administration’s priorities, according to a report by nonprofit newsroom CalMatters.
Lawyers representing the research professors in a lawsuit filed against President Donald Trump are asking a federal judge to formally declare that the White House repeatedly violated the constitution, including the First Amendment. A court hearing is scheduled for Oct. 20 in the Northern District of California.
Federal agencies made the admission about the keyword searches in signed stipulations filed in court last week in Thakur v. Trump, a lawsuit that’s been ongoing since last spring, according to CalMatters.
According to the California news organization, the stipulations in the court filing show the agencies “did not terminate any grants based on alleged noncompliance with the terms of the grant” and instead used “general criteria, rather than grant-specific assessment of each award’s compliance, or performance,” lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote.
CalMatters reported that lawyers for the UC professors now contend that the admission proves three wide-ranging constitutional violations:
— By using keyword searches to review hundreds of grants and terminate them en masse rather than reviewing them individually on their merits, the Trump administration targeted research it found politically disfavorable, which is a First Amendment violation.
— In terminating 283 U.S. Department of Energy grants from states where a majority voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, and leaving untouched hundreds of grants that went to “red” states, the Trump administration wrongly punished researchers for merely living in states the White House politically opposed.
— By terminating billions of dollars in grants, and never rerouting that money to other grant opportunities, the administration violated the constitution by not spending money in ways Congress specifically required through laws it passed on how research funds should be used.
A message seeking comment from a UCLA media representative was not immediately answered. An effort to reach the White House for a comment was not immediately successful.
U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, who is overseeing the case in San Francisco federal court, has repeatedly sided with the UC professors and issued several preliminary injunctions forcing the federal agencies to restore the grants while she reviews the full merits of the case, CalMatters reported in its story Tuesday.
This includes the restoration of hundreds of grants at UCLA that the Trump administration sought to suspend over its allegations that the university tolerated antisemitism and permitted transgender women to compete on women’s sports teams, the story says.
CalMatters wrote that lawyers for professors in the Thakur case now want Lin to make a final ruling ordering the grants to be restored, rather than a preliminary one. Even if that were to happen, the federal agencies could decide to appeal Lin’s ruling to a higher court.
The stakes “are huge,” lawyers for the professors in the Thakur case wrote.
If the White House is “allowed to terminate this funding, the researchers, graduate students, and program staff that relied on the grants to pursue their lives’ work will all suffer significant damage to their reputations and careers,” attorneys wrote, CalMatters reported.