A judge on Aug. 12 ruled that the federal government must restore portions of the funding it had suspended from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
In a 12-page order, U.S. District Judge Rita Lin of the Northern District of California stated that the National Science Foundation (NSF) had violated a preliminary injunction requiring the agency to restore research grants previously awarded to UCLA.
It is unclear how much of the suspended funding will be restored under the order. Lin noted in her ruling that UCLA research projects lost more than $324 million in grant funding this year.
The ruling stemmed from a lawsuit filed in June by lawyers representing UCLA researchers, alleging that the NSF had unlawfully terminated the grants by usurping Congress’s spending authority. Lin granted a preliminary injunction on June 23, ordering NSF to reinstate the grants.
On July 30, the agency sent out letters in “another round of en masse, form letter funding cuts” to UCLA researchers, saying the grants were suspended because they “no longer effectuate program goals or agency priorities,” according to the ruling.
NSF followed with another letter on Aug. 1, saying the suspension was in response to “alleged racism, antisemitism, and policies around transgender athletes at UCLA,” the court order stated.
NSF argued that the injunction doesn’t apply because the grants were suspended and not terminated, but Lin found on Tuesday that the effect is the same because the suspension has no specified end date.
“In other words, researchers have no guarantee that funding will ever be restored and no way to take action to increase the likelihood of restoration,” the judge stated.
Lin stated that NSF’s suspension of the grants would halt federally funded research projects, lead to job losses among UCLA staff and graduate students, and leave research papers unpublished.
“NSF claims that it could simply turn around the day after the preliminary injunction issued, and halt funding on every grant that had been ordered reinstated, so long as that action was labeled as a ‘suspension’ rather than a ‘termination’. This is not a reasonable interpretation of the scope of the preliminary injunction,” Lin stated.
Lin directed the government and the lawyers for UCLA researchers to file an update by Aug. 19, confirming all steps to comply with the preliminary injunction “have been completed by NSF or, in the event that has not occurred, an explanation of why it was not feasible and description of the steps that have been taken thus far.”
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