‘Blatant violation’: Judge orders Trump admin to restore millions in funding to researchers, rules decision to terminate grants was ‘likely illegal’

A federal court in California on Monday ordered the Trump administration to restore millions of dollars in research grants to scientists and others in the University of California system.

In a 62-page order, U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin, a Joe Biden appointee, granted a motion for a preliminary injunction and certified two classes of plaintiffs who will have their funding restored.

The judge took the government to task for both the method used to cut funding — form letters — and the stated reason those funds were cut.

“The law requires administrative agencies to provide reasoned explanations for their decisions, particularly when changing a longstanding practice and abruptly upending years of planning and work,” the order reads. “The form termination letters here appear to be in blatant violation of that requirement. Plaintiffs have also shown irreparable harm. The undisputed evidence is that the termination of their funding will likely result in layoffs, educational interruptions, impair ongoing research projects, harm Plaintiffs’ careers and reputations, and suppress protected speech.”

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In January and February, President Donald Trump issued several executive orders which broadly attempted to root out diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) projects within the federal government.

Relevant to the present litigation, a number of administrative agencies moved to effectuate the president’s directives by “terminating scores of already awarded federal grants,” the plaintiffs explained in their 107-page complaint. But various agencies, influenced by the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), went a bit beyond the DEI-focused grant terminations and put millions of additional dollars on the metaphorical chopping block.

“The executive orders also more broadly directed agencies to engage in a wide-scale termination of previously issued grants,” the opinion reads. “In response, federal agencies began abruptly terminating grants en masse through form termination letters that state simply that the grants no longer meet ‘agency priorities.’ Over $324 million in grants to the University of California have already been terminated. Agency Defendants have admitted that grants were flagged for termination for researching blacklisted topics, based on keyword searches or titles.”

Lin’s order pumps the brakes on the grant terminations in two ways: barring the government from further canceling UC researcher funds; and ordering terminated funding to be reinstated.

The lead plaintiff in the case, Dr. Neeta Thakur, is a researcher at UCSF who studies “ways to mitigate the health risks of wildfire smoke in communities of color and low-income communities,” the court explains. The judge cites Thakur’s situation as an example of how the Trump administration’s grant-cutting behavior worked in practice.

“Her three-year project was cancelled without warning, and with no explanation of why it constituted forbidden DEI work,” the order reads.

In ruling for the plaintiffs, the judge found their claims would best be dealt with as a class because the defendants themselves are issuing “massive waves” of “class-wide” form letters which “contain no reasoned grant-specific explanation for why the agency changed its mind.”

And, the court ruled those grant rescissions were unconstitutional.

From the ruling, at length:

Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on their claims that the termination of grants for research involving blacklisted topics like “diversity” and “equity” violates the First Amendment and runs contrary to Congress’s specific directives to support research concerning — and foster greater involvement in the sciences of — underrepresented groups. Although a new presidential administration is entitled to develop programs with its chosen priorities, the Executive may not set out to suppress ideas it deems dangerous by trying to drive them out of the marketplace of ideas, and may not do so by canceling grants on the basis that they serve the very purposes for which Congress appropriated the funds.

The judge also found the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claim the grant terminations were arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) — the federal statute governing administrative agencies and litigation against agency actions.

The government, for its part, tried to defend the case with a dual-pronged jurisdictional attack — by arguing the plaintiffs’ actually were just raising contract disputes and that the plaintiffs did not actually have standing to litigate the claims at all.

The judge took both of those arguments together and said they were “difficult-to-reconcile” because they were based on two entirely different bases. But, then she quickly dismissed them by finding that none of the claims were breach-of-contract disputes.

“Plaintiffs have standing to bring their claims seeking injunctive relief on the grounds that the Agency Defendants terminated the grants to punish their protected speech,” the order goes on. “Plaintiffs suffered direct, classic injury-in-fact from likely illegal grant terminations that upended their research and threatened the funds from which they are paid.”

In creating the classes, the court identified two groups of plaintiffs: those who can show they were specifically targeted for DEI-related work and those who were generally defunded via form letters. The separately-issued injunction defines these groups as the “equity” and “form” termination classes.

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