Trump admin cancellation of UC funding sends researchers into fury

A filing in San Francisco court last week has researchers from the University of California feeling bullish about an ongoing legal fight with the Trump administration. 

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Last year, the administration, through various agencies, cut money from thousands of research grants within the UC system. It sparked a yearlong legal saga between the federal government, which made the cuts, and a group of university professors who lost the research money. As part of a court filing last week, the researchers’ lawyers wrote that per sworn statements, the agencies in question “used ‘search terms, keywords, or phrases’—and in some cases ‘artificial intelligence tools or software’—‘to identify grants for termination review.’”

The lawyers argue those cuts violate the First Amendment because they targeted researchers who work in Democratic-leaning states or were pursuing ideas that were not favorable to the Trump administration, like projects that prioritized disadvantaged communities or grants that mentioned working on diversity within the workplace. Additionally, the lawyers say, because the administration never rerouted that money elsewhere, the terminations violated the Constitution’s appropriations clause.

The departments admitted to using specific keywords, like “health equity” and “structural racism,” among other specific words and phrases relating to race and gender, in their attempts to manually search for projects from which they wanted to cut funding. CalMatters was the first to report on these findings.

Seven researchers from campuses in Berkeley, San Francisco, Davis and San Diego filed the lawsuit after receiving letters last summer from the federal agencies funding their research that all said a variation of the same thing: The work they do “no longer effectuates the agency’s needs and priorities.” The plaintiffs said designated federal funding was stripped away from them by the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Transportation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

CalMatters reported that the EPA is currently working on a settlement.

The National Institutes of Health cut significant funding relating to cancer and vaccine research, as well as LGBTQ health research. The Department of Transportation  from a UC Davis professor because the research prioritized “disadvantaged communities” and “diversifying the transportation workforce,” causing that professor to lose 10% of her annual income. 

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In California alone, nearly $2 billion in grants was slashed from research budgets. Funding was also stripped from Harvard, Columbia and Brown universities.

There have already been some wins for these researchers. UCLA was the primary target of these cuts last year, when hundreds of grants were pulled from various research projects. In August, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin ordered that 300 grants be restored from the National Science Foundation. A month later, Lin ordered that ordered around 500 National Institutes of Health grants be restored. A handful of those grants went toward drug innovation and other health and science discoveries.

The lawyers representing the university researchers on the case are asking for Lin, who is also presiding over this case, to skip a trial and instead make a final determination that the cuts violated the Constitution and mandate a return of the money. A hearing is scheduled for Oct. 20.