In a ruling that’s already sending shockwaves through the world of higher education, a federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore over $500 million in frozen research grants to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). The decision, handed down on September 23, 2025, by U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, comes after months of escalating tension between the Trump administration and the University of California system over accusations of antisemitism and controversial campus policies.
Judge Lin’s order reinstates 500 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants that the administration suspended in July, part of a broader freeze that affected nearly 800 UCLA science grants. The suspensions, valued at more than half a billion dollars, had threatened to derail research into life-saving drugs, dementia, heart disease in rural areas, robotics education, and a host of other scientific endeavors. According to reporting by Devdiscourse, Lin described the withholding of these grants as potentially “arbitrary and capricious,” a sharp rebuke of the administration’s approach.
The roots of this legal battle stretch back to the Trump administration’s demand for a staggering $1.2 billion settlement from UCLA and the University of California, stemming from accusations that the campus permits antisemitism. The administration’s settlement demand was met with fierce opposition from within the university community. More than 600 Jewish members of the University of California system issued a public letter denouncing the claim as “misguided and punitive.” As they put it, “Cutting off hundreds of millions of research funds will do nothing to make UCLA safer for Jews nor diminish antisemitism in the world.”
These sentiments were echoed by the Jewish Public Affairs Committee of California, a coalition of 39 organizations, which stated last month that the Trump administration’s settlement demand “does not make Jewish students safer.” The group acknowledged that “meaningful progress is already underway in California” to address campus antisemitism, pointing to ongoing efforts by UC and UCLA leadership to implement recommendations from a university-commissioned task force.
At the heart of the controversy are accusations leveled by federal agencies, including the NIH and the National Science Foundation, which in July sent letters to UCLA alleging the university’s use of race-based admissions, its policy allowing transgender women to compete in women’s sports, and what they characterized as insufficient action against antisemitism. However, as CalMatters reported, California has barred public campuses from admitting students based on race since 1996, following a statewide ballot measure. The agencies argued that UCLA’s “holistic review” admissions process, which considers factors like neighborhood, family income, and school profile, effectively amounts to race-based admissions. In their words, UCLA’s process is “a transparent attempt to engage in race-based admissions in all but name.”
The backdrop to these accusations includes a July 2025 Department of Justice report that accused UCLA of not doing enough to address antisemitism, particularly in relation to pro-Palestine protests and encampments the previous year. These events, which drew national attention, highlighted the complex and often contentious intersection of free speech, academic freedom, and campus safety. Students and faculty protesting Israel’s war in Gaza—including Arab, Muslim, and Jewish members of the UCLA community—have themselves accused the university of bias against them.
Judge Lin’s ruling is not the first time she’s intervened on behalf of University of California researchers. Since June, she has issued a string of orders restoring hundreds of other UC research grants from multiple federal agencies. In June, Lin issued an injunction—later upheld by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals—ordering the Trump administration to restore 114 National Science Foundation grants and several dozen other grants from agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Endowment for the Humanities. By August, she sided with researchers again, undoing funding freezes for an additional 300 National Science Foundation grants.
Lin’s rationale in these cases has centered on the Administrative Procedure Act, a law requiring federal agencies to provide detailed, individualized explanations for terminating grants. She found that the mass termination of UC grants violated this law, echoing similar conclusions reached by other federal district courts. In her most recent order, Lin wrote, “The district courts are the only forum where the UC researchers could defend their constitutional and statutory rights, and the Ninth Circuit has already determined that they may bring their claims here. This Court will not shut its doors to them.”
Her decision also carves out a significant legal opening for individual researchers. In August, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that lawsuits seeking to restore defunded grants should be brought in the Court of Federal Claims, not district courts. However, Lin pointed out a crucial limitation: only universities, not individual researchers, have standing to sue in the Court of Federal Claims. This, she argued, would leave researchers with no viable legal avenue if universities chose not to act. She underscored the potential danger of this approach by noting that, under the federal government’s argument, “if the federal government terminated the funding of all Black researchers, or every researcher with an Asian last name—the researchers would have nowhere to sue to undo those wrongs, unless their universities decided to sue in the Court of Federal Claims.”
The stakes in this legal fight extend far beyond UCLA. The suspended science grants are a key source of income and training for graduate students, who represent the next generation of publicly funded academics. The grants help fuel the nation’s research enterprise and are the top source of federal research funding at the University of California. As faculty groups and unions have argued in their lawsuit, the Trump administration’s funding cuts represent “an unlawful threat of federal funding cuts” designed to “illegally coerce the UC into suppressing free speech and academic freedom rights.”
The Trump administration’s actions align closely with Project 2025, a conservative policy blueprint aimed at reshaping higher education and the federal government. All three criticisms cited in the agencies’ July letters—race-based admissions, transgender participation in sports, and campus antisemitism—mirror the agenda outlined in Project 2025 and reflect the administration’s broader efforts to assert federal control over university policies.
Judge Lin’s order requires the Trump administration to submit a compliance report by September 29, 2025, confirming that the grants have been restored. Her preliminary injunction, while not the final word in this ongoing legal saga, provides a crucial respite for UCLA researchers and a potential roadmap for others seeking to challenge federal grant terminations on similar grounds.
For now, the restoration of these grants ensures that vital research at UCLA can continue, even as the broader debate over academic freedom, free speech, and the role of government in higher education rages on.
