UC Berkeley researchers team up for first-of-its-kind lawsuit over Trump funding cuts

“These cuts threaten to stifle lifesaving biomedical research, hobble U.S. economic competitiveness and jeopardize the health of Americans who depend on cutting-edge medical science and innovation,” Stett Holbrook, a university system spokesman, said in an email. “Appeals to grants are being handled on a case-by-case basis.”   

Peter Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy at Stetson University in Florida, sees a benefit to legal action that comes from university staff members. 

“It makes a really powerful statement that the professors themselves are stakeholders and that it’s just not the institutions alone,” he said. “It’s a way of saying, ‘Well, if you’re slow to the battlefield, we’re going to get there first.’” 

The University of California schools are some of the largest recipients of federal research funding in academia; they took in $4 billion cumulatively last year. 

And they’ve been hit hard by the cuts. Though it’s difficult to track exactly how much universities — in California or elsewhere — have lost, UC administrators have said that it’s in the hundreds of millions of dollars and that it led them to impose a hiring freeze in February. 

The lawsuit names President Trump, the Department of Government Efficiency, and 16 federal agencies — including the National Institutes of Health; the departments of Agriculture, Education, Health and Human Services, State and Transportation; the National Science Foundation; and the Environmental Protection Agency — as defendants. The EPA, USDA, NSF, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and U.S. Department of the Interior said they do not comment on pending litigation. The other agencies did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the suit.  

Early in his presidency, Trump signed executive orders that directed government offices to end funding for programs deemed to promote diversity, equity and inclusion, along with green energy initiatives. The Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency also canceled a swath of grants across many federal agencies that it considered wasteful. Government officials at multiple departments then sent notices to researchers who’d already been approved to receive grants and who were often in the middle of multiyear investigations that their funding would be cut off immediately. Some cuts were blocked by injunctions, but many still stand. 

Researchers can usually appeal their individual grant cancellations to the agencies, but Polsky compared such appeals to “trying to prop individual trees back up when the entire forest is being lit on fire.” And even successful appeals may come with new conditions attached by the Trump administration. 

Jedda Foreman, director of the Center for Environmental Learning at the Lawrence Hall of Science, is one of the plaintiffs. Her interactive museum at UC Berkeley lost over $6 million from nine grant cancellations, according to the suit. Some funding from the NSF, for instance, supported projects intended to broaden interest in science education across different communities, she said.  

The NSF declined to comment on the terminations but said it canceled some awards because they were “not in alignment with current NSF priorities.” 

Another lead plaintiff, history professor Christine Philliou, lost a $250,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to study Greek Orthodox Christians in 18th century Turkey. It was canceled in April with no explanation other than that the agency’s priorities had changed, leaving her team “flabbergasted,” she said. The National Endowment for the Humanities didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

“We believed in rule of law and felt like, ‘Well, we have this grant; they can’t just take it last-minute,’” Philliou said. 

Ken Alex, director of Project Climate, UC Berkeley Law’s initiative to advance solutions to global warming, is another plaintiff. He had been in the middle of a three-year study, funded by the EPA, using drones and robots to find cheaper ways to monitor methane emissions from landfills, a major contributor to climate change.  

But the EPA cut off Alex’s funding in late April. Like many of the stop-work orders, it said only that the study no longer meets government priorities. 

The EPA declined to comment on funding for UC Berkeley but said it continues to invest in research “to advance the mission of protecting human health and the environment.” 

The Trump administration’s impact on UC Berkeley goes beyond funding cuts. 

In addition to a federal investigation into how the UC system addressed allegations of antisemitic incidents, the Education Department is probing UC Berkeley’s finances. And the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has demanded and received information from university administrators about more than 800 faculty members who signed open letters about student activism against Israel’s strikes on Gaza. Several have already received calls from one or both of the agencies. 

The scrutiny has put professors on edge. Polsky and others organized demonstrations against the funding cuts this semester — unusual for faculty members, even at a hotbed of activism like Berkeley. The Academic Senate also passed a resolution urging the school administration to resist any intrusive government demands for reform. 

“Never in the 12 years I have been at Berkeley have I seen this much faculty agreement about anything, period,” said Poulomi Saha, an associate professor of English at UC Berkeley, one of the faculty members who organized rallies. 

If the suit survives to be certified as a class action — a process that usually takes months — it could be opened up to any other UC faculty members or researchers whose funding has similarly been terminated since Trump returned to office.