Donald Trump’s bizarre plan to destroy cancer research just got laughed out of court

A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to restore a whopping $500 million in federal grant funding that was frozen at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). US District Judge Rita Lin in San Francisco granted a preliminary injunction, stating that the government likely broke the law when it froze the funding by violating the Administrative Procedure Act, which requires specific procedures and explanations for federal funding cuts.

Instead of providing any real details, the administration just sent out generalized form letters to UCLA, saying that multiple grants were being suspended. Harvard pointed out that these had many mistakes aside from being illegal, but Trump continued. It’s a pretty big deal, especially since this ruling brings back hundreds of medical research grants from the National Institutes of Health, which include studies on things like Parkinson’s disease treatment, cancer recovery, and nerve regeneration.

This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has tried to pull something like this. According to The Guardian, the administration announced that it had suspended a total of $584 million in grants over allegations of civil rights violations related to antisemitism and affirmative action. The administration seems to be just causing pain to the studies, and the loss of money can do a lot of damage, even if it’s restored later.

Trump can’t seem to make any college do what he wants

Judge Lin had already stepped in last month and ordered $81 million in grants from the National Science Foundation to be restored to UCLA. She ruled that those specific cuts had violated a previous preliminary injunction where she had ordered the National Science Foundation to restore dozens of grants across the entire University of California system.

The whole thing feels like a power play, honestly. The Trump administration has been using its control of federal funding to try and force reforms at elite colleges that it claims are “overrun by liberalism and antisemitism”. They’ve also been launching investigations into diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts, saying that these programs discriminate against white and Asian American students. It’s a pretty cynical move when you think about it, weaponizing civil rights laws to try and force universities to fall in line.

It’s not just UCLA, either. The administration has been at this with a bunch of other top-tier universities. Columbia and Brown, for example, ended up making deals to get their funding back after it was held up over similar accusations. Harvard, on the other hand, decided to fight back with a lawsuit, and a federal judge ruled in their favor, saying that the funding freeze was illegal retaliation for Harvard’s rejection of the administration’s demands.

In the case of UCLA, the Trump administration had the audacity to propose settling their investigation with a staggering $1 billion payment from the university. To be fair, that’s an absolutely insane amount of money for a university to pay. California’s Democratic Governor Gavin Newsom has called it an “extortion attempt”, and it’s hard to disagree with him. UCLA, for its part, said that such a massive payment would “devastate” the institution.

This kind of political back-and-forth has real-world consequences, and it’s awful for the researchers and students who depend on this funding. The case has been closely watched by researchers on UCLA’s Westwood campus, many of whom had to scale back their lab hours and even consider layoffs while the funding was frozen.