A federal judge in California ordered the National Science Foundation to reinstate millions of dollars in grants awarded to the University of California, Los Angeles, finding that the agency had tried to circumvent a ruling in June requiring restoration of the funds.
In a pointed order on Tuesday evening, Judge Rita F. Lin wrote that the Trump administration had misleadingly framed its latest attempt to cancel the grants as suspensions.
“N.S.F. claims that it could simply turn around the day after the preliminary injunction” and freeze “funding on every grant that had been ordered reinstated, so long as that action was labeled as a ‘suspension’ rather than a ‘termination,’” she wrote. “This is not a reasonable interpretation.”
Judge Lin, a Biden appointee, noted in the order that the University of California system had lost around $324 million in grant funding earlier this year as the Trump administration began culling science funding for projects it considered out of step with the president’s agenda.
In the previous ruling in June, Judge Lin informed the Trump administration that it could issue cancellations of individual grants for coherent reasons, but not blanket terminations.
But beginning on July 30, the administration sent out a round of letters announcing what Judge Lin described as “en masse, form letter funding cuts,” targeting U.C.L.A. specifically, freezing more than $300 million in research funds. That sum appeared to include around $81 million in funding awarded by the N.S.F.
The judge said that letters on the cuts echoed familiar grievances about the university’s handling of diversity in admissions practices, alleged antisemitism on campus and policies surrounding transgender athletes — the same grounds on which the administration has tried to extract enormous settlements from Harvard and other universities in recent weeks.
Judge Lin said that the Trump administration’s freezing of university grants appeared designed more to suspend research the Trump administration has associated with liberal causes than to sincerely address concerns about racism or antisemitism.
In a related case focused on grants from the National Institutes of Health, a federal judge in Massachusetts described the cancellations of those grants as discriminatory toward racial and sexual minorities and driven by animus toward vulnerable groups. He similarly ordered that funding restored in an impassioned ruling from the bench in June.
In Judge Lin’s ruling, she directed the government to return next Tuesday to update the court on its progress in complying with the order.
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the federal courts, including the legal disputes over the Trump administration’s agenda.
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