A federal district judge ordered the National Institutes of Health on Monday to unfreeze hundreds of millions of dollars in research funds that it had withheld from the University of California, Los Angeles, over claims of civil rights violations at the institution.
The preliminary injunction issued by Judge Rita F. Lin of the United States District Court of the Northern District of California is temporary while a lawsuit over grant terminations across the University of California system makes its way through the courts. The suit was filed in June for grants terminated in the spring by various federal agencies, including the N.I.H. On July 31, the N.I.H. suspended about 500 additional grants at U.C.L.A., amounting to $518 million in unspent funds, according to Grant Witness, a crowdsourced online database.
The funding freeze, which also included grants from the National Science Foundation and the Energy Department, was part of the Trump administration’s broader effort to push back against what it has called “woke” ideology on college campuses.
In a letter addressed to U.C.L.A.’s chancellor, Julio Frenk, the N.I.H. said that the grant suspensions were punishment for antisemitism, race-based admissions practices and the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports at the university. The grants, which were not directly awarded for research related to these topics, were ordered to be indefinitely suspended until U.C.L.A. was brought “into compliance,” the letter said.
Judge Lin’s ruling requires the N.I.H. to reinstate funding for any University of California grants, including those awarded to U.C.L.A. researchers, that were terminated without a “grant-specific explanation” stating the reason for the change.
The move follows an order issued by Judge Lin in August that required the National Science Foundation to restore about $90 million in suspended U.C.L.A. grants. In that order, Judge Lin ruled that indefinite grant suspensions “are terminations by another name.”
Together, the two rulings reinstate nearly all of the grants suspended at U.C.L.A. in July.
The new preliminary injunction also ordered the reinstatement of grants terminated at other schools in the University of California system, requiring the restoration of funding terminated this year by the Defense Department and the Transportation Department.
Katrina Miller is a science reporter for The Times based in Chicago. She earned a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago.
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