Tag: Grant

  • NIH Approves 100s of Grant Applications It Shelved or Denied

    NIH Approves 100s of Grant Applications It Shelved or Denied

    The National Institutes of Health is deciding, per court agreements, whether to award or deny droves of grant applications that the agency previously either rejected or shelved. This funding was stalled last year amid the Trump administration’s blunt moves to restrict research into certain disfavored topics, such as diversity, equity and inclusion—though researchers and state attorneys general said officials shot down a greater range of projects, including ones that could save lives.

    The NIH’s agreements, laid out in court filings in two ongoing lawsuits, are already bearing fruit. A spokesperson for the Massachusetts attorney general’s office, which is leading one of the cases, said the agreement in that suit promises decisions on more than 5,000 grants nationally. On Dec. 29, the date of the agreement, the NIH issued 528 grant decisions, 499 of which were approvals, the spokesperson said.

    A spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is leading the other case, said the agreement in that case involves about 400 grants. He said the NIH awarded at least 135 out of 146 applications in a batch of decisions on Dec. 29.

    The filings set a series of dates by which the NIH agreed to decide on awarding or denying other types of grants. The last deadline is July 31.

    The agreements are another example of the Trump administration reversing many of its sweeping cuts to research funding in response to litigation. Researchers and organizations filed suit after suit last year after the NIH and other federal funding agencies abruptly terminated previously awarded grants and sat on applications for new ones.

    In a news release, the ACLU said the grants that the NIH will now decide on “address urgent public health issues, including HIV prevention, Alzheimer’s disease, LGBTQ+ health, and sexual violence.” ACLU of Massachusetts legal director Jessie Rossman said in the release that the NIH’s “unprecedented” and “unlawful” actions put “many scientists’ careers in limbo, including hundreds of members of the American Public Health Association and the UAW union.”

    ACLU lawyers are among the attorneys representing those groups, Ibis Reproductive Health and individual researchers in a suit they filed in April against the NIH and the larger Health and Human Services Department for stalling and rejecting grant funding. Democratic state attorneys general filed a similar suit in the same court, the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts.

    The agencies agreed to decide these grant applications in exchange for the plaintiffs dismissing some of their claims. The agencies didn’t admit wrongdoing.

    In a news release, the Massachusetts attorney general’s office said the Trump administration “indefinitely withheld issuing final decisions on applications that had already received approval from the relevant review panels,” leaving the states that sued “awaiting decisions on billions of dollars.”

    The release said that, for example, when the suit was filed in April, the University of Massachusetts “had 353 applications for NIH funding whose review had been delayed, signifying millions in potential grant funding that would aid in lifesaving medical research.” Massachusetts attorney general Andrea Joy Campbell said in a statement that “lifesaving studies related to Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, and other devastating illnesses were frozen indefinitely—stealing hope from countless families across the country and putting lives at risk.”

    It’s unclear how much money the NIH may dole out in total. An HHS spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that the “NIH cannot comment on the status of individual grant applications or deliberations.”

    “The agency remains committed to supporting rigorous, evidence-based research that advances the health of all Americans,” the spokesperson said. HHS and the NIH didn’t provide interviews or further comment.

    Meanwhile, a legal fight continues over grants that the NIH previously approved but later canceled.

    Lingering Questions

    In June, in these same two cases, U.S. District Judge William Young ordered the NIH to restore grants the agency had awarded but then—after Trump retook the White House—terminated midgrant.

    Young, a Reagan appointee, criticized the federal government for not formally defining DEI, despite using that term to justify terminating grants. He said at a hearing that he’d “never seen racial discrimination by the government like this” during his four decades as a federal judge.

    But, two months later, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 preliminary decision, stayed Young’s ruling ordering restoration of the grants. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, wrote for the majority that Young “likely lacked jurisdiction to hear challenges to the grant terminations, which belong in the Court of Federal Claims.” However, STAT reported that the NIH had restored more than 2,000 terminated grants following Young’s ruling, and it didn’t reverse course after the Supreme Court decision.

    That question of whether researchers with canceled grants must ultimately try their luck before the Court of Federal Claims is now before the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals. There’s a hearing Tuesday in that matter.

    Questions linger about when the grant fight will really end. In a video interview with journalist Paul Thacker—released Wednesday and previously reported on by STAT—NIH director Jay Bhattacharya said that, despite the grant restorations, any grants dealing with DEI that come up for renewal this year won’t be funded. Bhattacharya distinguished between cutting a grant and not renewing it.

    He said that, “as best I can understand the legal aspects,” the courts have said his agency can’t cut restored grants. “But, when it comes to renewal, those grants no longer meet NIH priorities … so when they come up for renewal over the course of the year, we won’t renew them,” he said.

    Bhattacharya said the NIH’s DEI-related work “did not actually have any chance of improving the health of minority populations.” He said, “I think that the shift away from DEI is of a piece with the rest of what we’re trying to do at the NIH, which is to do research that actually makes the lives of people better.”

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  • NSF Lowers Grant Review Requirements, NIH Hunts for Phrases

    NSF Lowers Grant Review Requirements, NIH Hunts for Phrases

    The NIH and NSF, which both fund research, gave staff new grant review instructions this month.

    sorbetto | DigitalVision Vectors

    Two major federal research funding agencies are altering their grant review processes. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is scaling back its reviews of grant proposals, according to a Dec. 1 internal memo that Science obtained and published, while STAT reported that the National Institutes of Health distributed guidance Friday ordering staff to use a “text analysis tool” to search for certain phrases.

    The NSF memo says the government shutdown, which ended in November, hampered its progress toward doling out all its funding by the end of the new fiscal year. It said “we lost critical time” and “now face [a] significant backlog of unreviewed proposals and canceled review panels. In parallel, our workforce has been significantly reduced.”

    The memo said the changes “enable Program Officers to expedite award and decline decisions,” including by moving away from the “usual three or more reviews” of proposals. It said that, now, “full proposals requiring external review must be reviewed by a minimum of two reviewers or have a minimum of two reviews. An internal review may substitute for one.”

    NSF spokesperson Mike England didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed the memo. He said in an email that the changes are “part of a comprehensive approach to streamlining processes and reducing administrative burden” and “also help expedite the processing of shutdown-related backlogs while maintaining the rigor of the external merit review process.”

    As for the NIH guidance, while it instructs program officers on how to review and possibly terminate grants, STAT reported that “some outside experts said the guidance is a positive step, making future terminations more of a dialogue that researchers can push back on.”

    But another media outlet, NOTUS, published a more critical article on the guidance, saying the “Trump administration is pausing new funding for National Institutes of Health grants that include terms like ‘health equity’ and ‘structural racism,’ pending review.” NOTUS reported that the guidance says new funding won’t be provided to “misaligned” grants until “all areas of non-alignment have been addressed.”

    Both articles said NIH ordered staff to use a “computational text analysis tool” to scan current and new grants for terms that may mean the submissions are misaligned with NIH priorities. (The NSF memo similarly said “Program Officers are also expected to maximize their use of available automated merit review tools, especially tools that identify proposals that should be returned without review.”)

    Andrew G. Nixon, a spokesperson for the Health and Human Services Department, which includes NIH, didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed a copy of the NIH guidance. In an email, he wrote that “claims that NIH issued a ‘banned words list’ or conducted word searches to remove specific terms from grants are unequivocally false. NIH has never prohibited the use of any particular words in grant applications.”

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  • Pell Grant program faces up to $11B annual budget shortfall

    Pell Grant program faces up to $11B annual budget shortfall

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    Dive Brief: 

    • The Pell Grant program faces a 10-year shortfall of up to $97 billion, with the recent expansion to include short-term workforce programs adding to existing structural funding problems, according to a Friday analysis from the nonprofit Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. 
    • The massive spending package Republicans passed this summer, called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, gave the Pell Grant program $10.5 billion in one-time funding to avoid a looming budget shortfall. However, this will only delay the shortfall, according to analysts.
    • CRFB expects the Pell Grant program’s costs to exceed its funding by $6 billion to $11 billion each year over the next decade. “The underlying structural gap between costs and appropriations remains unaddressed, and in fact was made worse under OBBBA,” the analysts said.

    Dive Insight:  

    Before Republicans passed their spending package, the Pell Grant program was expected to deplete its reserves by the 2025 fiscal year. With the $10.5 billion infusion, lawmakers staved off that crisis — but only by about two years, according to CRFB’s analysis. 

    That’s in part because the legislative package also expands Pell Grant funding to programs as short as eight weeks, starting in July 2026. CRFB pointed to Congressional Budget Office data estimating that the expansion, known as Workforce Pell, will add about $2 billion to the program’s costs over the next decade. 

    But authors of Friday’s analysis expect this number to be much higher —  $6 billion or more — depending on how many students apply for Workforce Pell, how states and institutions carry out the program, and how the U.S. Department of Education interprets and enforces the accountability measures established by Congress. 

    “History suggests that when new eligibility is created, enrollment often exceeds initial projections,” analysts said, citing a 2020 report on proposals at the time for short-term Pell from New America, a left-leaning think tank.

    In 2008, lawmakers expanded Pell Grants to be available year-round. At the time, the CBO estimated the program would cost $2.6 billion over the next five years. But in 2011, a U.S. Education Department official testified before Congress that the program expansion was costing 10 times higher annually than expected. 

    Similarly, in 2005, Congress lifted restrictions on federal student aid flowing to fully online colleges. While the Education Department expected the change to cost $697 million over 10 years, online-only colleges received “billions in federal aid dollars” in the 2018-19 award year alone, New America found. 

    In Friday’s analysis, researchers estimated the Pell Grant program would face a $61 billion 10-year shortfall if lawmakers keep its appropriations adjusted for inflation and maintain the maximum award of $7,395. If lawmakers keep both appropriations and the maximum award flat, that shortfall would reach $88 billion. 

    Moreover, the shortfall would hit $97 billion if lawmakers raise Pell Grant funding and the maximum award in line with inflation and Workforce Pell enrollment outpaces expectations, the researchers estimated. 

    The Education Department is meeting this week with selected students, employers, college officials and other stakeholders in a process known as negotiated rulemaking to work out regulations for implementing the new program. Under the 2025 statute, short-term programs must have a 70% job placement rate and a 70% graduation rate to be eligible for Pell Grants. 

    In a draft of regulatory language released last week, the Education Department proposed that, for the first couple years of the program, job placements would count regardless of what fields students enter. However, after the 2027-28 award year, programs would have to show that at least 70% of their students land jobs specifically in fields for which they were being trained.

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  • 21 States, D.C. Ask Court to Reverse TRIO Grant Rejections

    21 States, D.C. Ask Court to Reverse TRIO Grant Rejections

    Twenty-one state attorneys general and the AG of Washington, D.C., filed briefs in support of lawsuits challenging the cancellation of TRIO grants for programs such as Upward Bound at Montgomery County Community College.

    Linda Johnson/Montgomery County Community College

    Democratic attorneys general from 21 states and Washington, D.C., filed briefs this week asking a court to reverse the Trump administration’s rejection of grants supporting TRIO programs, which help disadvantaged students attend and graduate from colleges and universities.

    The Council for Opportunity in Education, which advocates for TRIO programs such as Upward Bound, said about 100 grants were rejected or canceled last month after the Education Department delayed funding for thousands of grants that were slated to begin Sept. 1. Another 23 programs lost funding earlier in the year.

    Those terminations deprived more than 43,600 students of services such as tutoring and financial aid help. (Trump’s fiscal year 2026 budget request would end TRIO altogether, and all but a handful of staff in the TRIO grants office were fired early in the ongoing government shutdown.)

    On Sept. 30, the Council filed two lawsuits against the department and Education Secretary Linda McMahon in the U.S. District Court for D.C., alleging that the department canceled grants for complying with the General Education Provisions Act Equity Directive—a requirement at the time of the applications. One suit argues the department faulted a University of New Hampshire application for allegedly saying its program would be “identifying and recruiting students of color and non-Caucasians.”

    The Council is requesting preliminary injunctions vacating the department’s denials and ordering reconsideration of the grants. The attorneys general filed amicus briefs supporting this call.

    “TRIO programs serving thousands of high-school and college students have closed, many of which have operated successfully for years with track records of success,” the briefs say. “Students who relied on these programs’ guidance and academic assistance are now being turned away. The result will be fewer students going to college and fewer students graduating college, to the detriment of impacted Amici States, their residents, and their economies.”

    The AGs of Nevada and Massachusetts were the briefs’ lead authors; they were joined by their counterparts in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Hawai‘i, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.

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  • How rare are colleges that enroll and graduate high shares of Pell Grant students?

    How rare are colleges that enroll and graduate high shares of Pell Grant students?

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    When it comes to colleges where Pell Grant recipients are at least 55% likely to graduate, there are not a whole lot throughout the U.S. In fact, nearly half of states — many of them Southern with some of the highest poverty rates in the country — don’t have any at all.

    That’s what Becca Spindel Bassett, higher education professor at the University of Arkansas, discovered in a recent analysis in which she sought to identify and map institutions of higher education that she describes as “equity engines.” 

    These are colleges where at least 34% of the students receive Pell Grants and at least 55% of those Pell Grant recipients earn a bachelor’s degree within six years.

    Out of the 1,584 public and private nonprofit four-year institutions that Bassett studied nationwide, she found only 91 — or less than 6% — that qualified for her “equity engine” distinction. 

    And they’re all clustered in 26 states, resulting in what Bassett calls a “spatial injustice” for low-income students who live in one of the states without any equity engines or in areas with limited access to such institutions.

    The almost eight dozen existing equity engines represent a diverse range of institutional types, including regional public universities, small Christian colleges and historically Black institutions. 

    As for whether states can invest more in colleges that are close to being equity engines — a key recommendation of Bassett’s study — it all depends.

    “It’s worth noting that over half of Equity Engines are private colleges and universities, so their relationship to the state and dependency on state funding varies,” Bassett said in an email to Higher Ed Dive.

    But improving Pell graduation rates isn’t only a question of funding models, she said. 

    Leaders at aspiring equity engines can learn best practices and approaches from these colleges and should be prepared to enact “organizational learning and change,” Bassett said. However, much is unknown about what enables colleges to become equity engines, including whether it depends on their programs and services or their policy and funding environments. 

    While Bassett’s study doesn’t answer those questions, a forthcoming book will describe how two of the colleges she identified as equity engines were able to achieve their results, she said. 

    Michael Itzkowitz, founder and president of the HEA Group, a higher ed-focused research firm and consultancy, said in an email that identifying colleges with strong graduation rates is a “good first step” because students who earn a degree “typically earn more than those who do not.” 

    However, Itzkowitz, who under former President Barack Obama served as the director of The College Scorecard — an online federal tool with various data on higher education institutions — added that it’s also critical to consider whether graduates are actually better off economically since “not all institutions and degrees are created equal.”

    “Students who earn a credential at one institution may experience wildly different outcomes if they earned the same degree elsewhere,” he said.

    David Hawkins, chief education and policy officer at the National Association for College Admission Counseling, said in an email that colleges would do well to emulate the equity engines Bassett identified, such as the University of Illinois Chicago. Bassett’s study calls the university a “major driver” of bachelor’s degree completion among Pell Grant recipients in the state, noting those students have a 58% six-year graduation rate.

    Among other things, Hawkins said, such institutions deploy a wide range of services — such as evening or online courses for working students, and transportation to campus — that have been proven to help low-income students cross the finish line.

     “From my perspective, the United States will only remain competitive if we can invest in a postsecondary infrastructure that serves all students who seek opportunity through higher education,” Hawkins said.  

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  • Purdue Ends GEAR UP Program After Federal Grant Cut

    Purdue Ends GEAR UP Program After Federal Grant Cut

    Purdue University is ending its GEAR UP program after the Trump administration canceled a $34.9 million federal grant to support its activities, WFYI reported. The program provided college-prep programming for more than 13,000 low-income students in Indiana, according to a 2024 press release from Purdue’s College of Education.  

    The grant, awarded last year, was expected to run through 2031. But the U.S. Department of Education told Purdue in a Sept. 12 termination letter that the grant application flouted the department’s policy of “prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education” and ran afoul of civil rights law. The letter referenced parts of the application, including plans to provide DEI training to hiring managers and professional development in “culturally responsive teaching.”

    The program is “inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, the best interest of the Federal Government,” the letter read. The GEAR UP program shut down on Tuesday. Purdue did not appeal the grant termination, WFYI reported.

    The Education Department has canceled at least nine GEAR UP grants, EducationWeek reported, though it continued awards for other programs last week.

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  • Trump May Attempt to Tie Grant Allocation to Capitulation

    Trump May Attempt to Tie Grant Allocation to Capitulation

    The Washington Post caught wind of these latest ideas through two anonymous White House officials.

    Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

    The Trump administration may be moving away from using individual investigations to try to force colleges into compliance with the president’s agenda and instead encourage compliance by giving institutions that demonstrate adherence to his policies a competitive advantage in obtaining research funding, according to The Washington Post.

    The new plan, which Post reporters heard about from two anonymous White House officials, would change the grant-application process and give a leg up to institutions that conform to President Donald Trump’s agenda regarding admissions, hiring and other campus policies. 

    If the plan takes effect, the Trump administration will no longer have to go after universities one by one through investigations and corresponding penalties, but rather can induce compliance from hundreds of institutions at once.

    “It’s time to effect change nationwide, not on a one-off basis,” one official told the Post.

    The current award-selection process for federal research grants is based primarily on scientific merit. Critics say that overriding such a standard would be a demonstrable example of executive overreach and a violation of academic freedom.

    “I can’t imagine a university in America that would be supportive of this,” said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education. 

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  • How consistent communication transformed our school culture

    How consistent communication transformed our school culture

    Key points:

    When I became principal of Grant Elementary a decade ago, I stepped into a school community that needed to come together. Family involvement was low, staff morale was uneven, and trust between school and home had to be rebuilt from the ground up.

    Early on, I realized the path forward couldn’t start and end in the classroom. We needed to look outward to families. Our goal wasn’t just to inform them. We needed to engage them consistently, with care and transparency.

    That meant changing how we communicated.

    A shift toward authentic partnership

    We made a schoolwide commitment to open up communication. That included using a digital platform to help our team connect with families more frequently, clearly, and consistently.

    With our platform, we could share classroom moments, highlight student growth, reinforce positive behavior, and build relationships, not just exchange information. Importantly, it also supported two-way communication, which was key to creating real partnership.

    The impact was visible right away. Families felt more connected. Teachers felt more supported. And students were proud to share their progress in ways that resonated beyond school walls.

    That foundation has become central to how we approach culture-building today.

    5 ways better communication deepened engagement

    A decade later, we’ve learned a lot about what it takes to build a strong school-home connection. Here are five strategies we’ve used to increase trust and engagement with our families:

    1. Strengthen student-teacher relationships
    Real communication depends on a two-way dialogue, not one-way blasts. It’s about building relationships. During the pandemic, for example, students submitted photos of artwork, short reflections, or voice notes through the platform we use. Even in isolation, they could stay connected to teachers and classmates and feel seen. That continuity gave them a sense of belonging when they needed it most.

    2. Reinforce positive behavior in real time
    Our school uses a digital point system tied to schoolwide expectations. Students can earn points and use them at our “Dojo Store,” a reward system named by our students themselves. From spirit week participation to classroom challenges, this approach helps students stay motivated while reinforcing a culture of positivity and pride.

    3. Build trust through direct, personal updates
    Many of our families speak different home languages or come from diverse cultural backgrounds, so building trust is something we focus on every day. One of the most impactful ways we’ve done that is by using ClassDojo, which is both direct and secure, while feeling personal–not formal or distant. When families receive messages in a language they understand, and know they’re coming straight from our school team, it helps them feel connected, informed, and valued.

    4. Share classroom stories, not just grades
    One of the most powerful changes we made was giving families a window into classroom life. Teachers regularly post photos, lesson highlights, and messages recognizing growth, not just achievement. Kids go home excited to show what was shared. And even those parents who can’t attend in-person events still feel part of the learning experience.

    5. Keep communication simple and accessible
    Ease of use matters. Even staff members hesitant about technology embraced our system once they saw how it strengthened connections. It became part of our school’s rhythm, like a digital bulletin board, messaging app, and family newsletter all in one. And because everything lives in one place, families aren’t scrambling to find information.

    What we gained

    This shift didn’t require an overhaul. We didn’t start from scratch or invest in a complex system. We just chose one easy-to-use platform families already loved, committed to using it consistently, and focused on relationships first.

    Today, that platform is still part of our daily practice. But the tool was never the end goal–we were trying to build connections.

    What we’ve gained is a more unified school community. We’ve seen more proactive family involvement, stronger student ownership, and a deeper sense of belonging across our campus.

    Families are informed. Teachers are supported. Students are celebrated.

    Looking ahead

    As we continue to evolve, we’ve learned that consistent, authentic communication isn’t a “nice to have.” It’s a foundational part of any school culture built on trust.

    If you’re leading a school or district and looking to increase family engagement, my biggest advice is this: Pick an accessible platform families are already familiar with and enjoy using. Use it consistently. And let families in–not just when it’s required, but when it matters.

    That’s where trust begins.

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  • Trump Political Appointees in Charge of Grant Decisions

    Trump Political Appointees in Charge of Grant Decisions

    The NIH is one of several agencies where a political appointee will have to sign off on grant awards.

    Wesley Lapointe/The Washington Post via Getty Images

    President Donald Trump is now requiring grant-making agencies to appoint senior officials who will review new funding opportunity announcements and grants to ensure that “they are consistent with agency priorities and the national interest,” according to an executive order issued Thursday. And until those political appointees are in place, agencies won’t be able to make announcements about new funding opportunities.

    The changes are aimed at both improving the process of federal grant making and “ending offensive waste of tax dollars,” according to the order, which detailed multiple perceived issues with how grant-making bodies operate. 

    The Trump administration said some of those offenses have included agencies granting funding for the development of “transgender-sexual-education” programs and “free services to illegal immigrants” that it claims worsened the “border crisis.” The order also claimed that the government has “paid insufficient attention” to the efficacy of research projects—noting instances of data falsification—and that a “substantial portion” of grants that fund university-led research “goes not to scientific project applicants or groundbreaking research, but to university facilities and administrative costs,” which are commonly referred to as indirect costs.  

    It’s the latest move by the Trump administration to take control of federally funded research supported by agencies such as the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy. Since taking office in January, those and other agencies have terminated thousands of grants that no longer align with their priorities, including projects focused on vaccine hesitancy, combating misinformation, LGBTQ+ health and promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. 

    Federal judges have since ruled some of those terminations unlawful. Despite those rulings, Thursday’s executive order forbids new funding for some of the same research topics the administration has already targeted.  

    It instructs the new political appointees of grant-making agencies to “use their independent judgment” when deciding which projects get funded so long as they “demonstrably advance the president’s policy priorities.” 

    Those priorities include not awarding grants to “fund, promote, encourage, subsidize, or facilitate” the following:

    • “Racial preferences or other forms of racial discrimination by the grant recipient, including activities where race or intentional proxies for race will be used as a selection criterion for employment or program participation;
    • “Denial by the grant recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic;
    • “Illegal immigration; or
    • “Any other initiatives that compromise public safety or promote anti-American values.”

    The order also instructs senior appointees to give preference to applications from institutions with lower indirect cost rates. (Numerous agencies have also moved to cap indirect research cost rates for universities at 15 percent, but federal courts have blocked those efforts for now.)

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  • With Grant Cuts, Trump Pressures UCLA to Make Deal

    With Grant Cuts, Trump Pressures UCLA to Make Deal

    The Trump administration announced last week it was freezing federal grants for another prestigious research university. But this time, it wasn’t a private institution.

    It was the University of California, Los Angeles, and if the UC system doesn’t make a deal with the federal government, campuses across one of the nation’s largest public higher education systems might incur the administration’s further punishment. State leaders condemned the funding freeze, and faculty at UCLA are urging university administrators to fight. But the university has said little about how it plans to respond to the administration.

    The Department of Justice has been investigating the University of California system for months—looking into alleged antisemitism, alleged use of race in admissions and “potential race- and sex-based discrimination in university employment practices.” The agency’s investigations into the broader UC system are still ongoing, but last week, the DOJ told system officials it had made a finding regarding one campus and demanded a quick response.

    “The Department has concluded that UCLA’s response to the protest encampment on its campus in the spring of 2024 was deliberately indifferent to a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI,” the letter said. (Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits universities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on shared ancestry, including antisemitism.)

    The letter didn’t specifically say what the Trump administration wants UC to do now about its alleged failure to handle a pro-Palestine encampment that ended more than a year ago, and that UCLA itself dismantled a week after its creation. The DOJ didn’t provide Inside Higher Ed further information Monday, but U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi’s news release accompanying the DOJ letter suggests the Trump administration wants significant concessions.

    “Our investigation into the University of California system has found concerning evidence of systemic anti-Semitism at UCLA that demands severe accountability from the institution,” Bondi said. “This disgusting breach of civil rights against students will not stand: DOJ will force UCLA to pay a heavy price for putting Jewish Americans at risk and continue our ongoing investigations into other campuses in the UC system.”

    Just hours before the DOJ’s announcement, UCLA had announced that it was paying $6.45 million to settle a lawsuit from Jewish students over reported antisemitism associated with the encampment. But that wasn’t enough to assuage the federal government.

    The DOJ letter said the department “seeks to enter into a voluntary resolution agreement with the university to ensure that the hostile environment is eliminated and reasonable steps are taken to prevent its recurrence.” It asked the UC officials to contact a special counsel by today if they were “interested in resolving this matter along these lines,” providing an email address and a nonfunctional nine-digit phone number for them to contact. The agency is prepared to sue by Sept. 2 “unless there is reasonable certainty that we can reach an agreement.”

    That July 29 letter wasn’t the end of it. In the week between then and today’s deadline for UC to contact the DOJ, multiple federal agencies said they’re cutting off grants to UCLA. The total amount is unclear—other media have reported numbers exceeding $300 million.

    It’s reminiscent of what happened at Columbia and Harvard Universities. But unlike with those private institutions, the Trump administration hasn’t published an overarching demand letter for how it wants UCLA to change its ways, whether in admissions, student discipline or otherwise.

    A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which includes the National Institutes of Health, responded to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for information on how much in NIH grant funding has been canceled and why with a two-line response attributed to an unnamed HHS official: “We will not fund institutions that promote antisemitism. We will use every tool we have to ensure institutions follow the law.”

    A National Science Foundation spokesperson wrote in an email that the NSF “informed the University of California, Los Angeles that the agency is suspending awards to UCLA because they are not in alignment with current NSF priorities and/or programmatic goals.” The spokesperson didn’t specify which priorities or which goals, and his email didn’t mention antisemitism.

    The Department of Energy went beyond allegations of antisemitism in its letter to UCLA, saying that “UCLA engages in racism, in the form of illegal affirmative action” and UCLA “endangers women by allowing men in women’s sports and private women-only spaces.”

    Mia McIver, executive director of the national American Association of University Professors, said what’s happening is the “Trump administration is extending its pattern of attacking higher education faculty, staff and students more broadly outward from the Ivy League universities into the public sector.” McIver, who taught at UCLA for a decade, said the administration intends to “exercise pervasive control over colleges and universities in every region of every different sort of institution.”

    “It is the federal government using levers of power that are completely unrelated to the underlying allegations,” McIver said. “Cutting off research for diabetes, cancer, heart disease will not improve the safety of Jewish faculty and students on campus and will not address antisemitism.”

    ‘Enough Is Enough’

    What does the UC system plan to do? A spokesperson deferred comment to UCLA, which also didn’t provide interviews Monday or answer written questions. The UC system spokesperson did forward a statement Friday from system president James B. Milliken, who started in his new job Aug. 1—just after the grant freezes. 

    Milliken called “the suspension this week of a large number of research grants and contracts” at UCLA “deeply troubling,” though “not unexpected.”

    “The research at UCLA and across UC more broadly saves lives, improves national security, helps feed the world, and drives the innovation economy in California and the nation,” he said. “It is central to who we are as a teaching and learning community. UC and campus leadership have been anticipating and preparing for the kind of federal action we saw this week, and that preparation helps support our decisions now.”

    He didn’t, however, say what the decisions would be.

    Also Friday, California governor Gavin Newsom, a potential 2028 presidential candidate and an ex officio member of the UC Board of Regents, released a statement calling it “a cruel manipulation to use Jewish students’ real concerns about antisemitism on campus as an excuse to cut millions of dollars in grants that were being used to make all Americans safer and healthier.”

    “This is the action of a president who doesn’t care about students, Californians, or Americans who don’t comply with his MAGA ways,” Newsom said.

    UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk said in a video on X Friday that “we share the goal of eradicating antisemitism. It has no place on our campus or in our society.” He said his wife is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and his paternal grandparents left Germany in the 1930s after being “driven out of their home by an intolerable climate of antisemitism and hate.”

    “These experiences inform my own commitment to combating bigotry in all its forms, but a sweeping penalty on lifesaving research doesn’t address any alleged discrimination,” Frenk said. He said, “We have contingency plans in place,” though he didn’t elaborate.

    In a petition, the UCLA Faculty Association’s Executive Board criticized UCLA administrators for their past “anticipatory obedience” to the federal government, which it said “has not prevented Trump administration attacks.”

    “UCLA’s anticipatory obedience has put itself in a place of weakness and we must instead choose to stand up,” the association wrote. “We do not have to bend to the Trump administration’s illegitimate and bad-faith demands. UCLA is a state university, with the financial backing and moral support of the fourth-largest economy in the world.”

    The association demanded that UC “demonstrate our strength as the world’s largest university system and reject the malicious demands of the Trump administration,” adding that “each university that falters legitimates the Trump administration’s attacks on all of our institutions.”

    It called for UC to fight the administration in court, to use unrestricted endowment funds to “help keep our university’s mission intact” and to work with Newsom and state lawmakers to get financial support. The petition ended with a call for university administrators to not “sacrifice our strengths and our community, deeply nurtured and protected for over 100 years, to a deeply callous and unfair federal administration that will only ask for more.”

    Meanwhile, Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UCLA said in a statement that “Israel continues to tighten its US-enabled siege of Gaza, where the calculated denial of humanitarian assistance is causing mass starvation amid ongoing aerial bombing. The theatrics of the Trump administration, echoed by UCLA, are part of a larger attempt to cover up this genocidal catastrophe in which all of us, and our university, are complicit.”

    McIver urged the UC system not to cut deals like Columbia and Brown Universities have.

    “There are always alternatives,” she said, “and every deal that is cut makes it harder for those who are downstream of the deal to continue resisting these attacks.”

    “The Trump administration is aiming to control colleges and universities at all levels in all states, and every settlement that is reached basically contributes to that goal,” she said. “And so there has to be a point at which everyone across the country stands up and says, ‘Enough is enough, we’re not going to tolerate this extortion, you can’t hold our campuses hostage and we’re not going to take it anymore.’”

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