Trump administration is freezing over $387 million for UCLA

WASHINGTON - The federal government is freezing more than US$300 million (S$387 million) in research funds for

UCLA over claims of anti-Semitism

and bias at the institution, according to its chancellor and Trump administration documents.

In a statement on July 30, the chancellor Julio Frenk said that the federal government was cutting “hundreds of grants” to the university.

Letters this week to UCLA from the Energy Department, National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health accuse the university of adhering to “illegal affirmative action” policies, failing to do enough to combat anti-Semitism on campus and discriminating against women by allowing the participation of transgender athletes.

The Trump administration paused the research funding as part of an investigation by the government’s anti-Semitism task force, two administration officials said. The freeze included about US$240 million in research grants from the Department of Health and Human Services and the NIH, US$81 million from the NSF and US$18.2 million from the Energy Department, a White House spokesperson said.

The move makes UCLA the latest university to be targeted by Trump administration officials. It comes amid a broader pushback by the administration against what it sees as “woke” ideologies.

The NSF said in a statement that it was “suspending awards to UCLA because they are not in alignment with current NSF priorities and/or programmatic goals”. The NIH did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In recent weeks, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Brown and others have had federal funding reduced or threatened based on broad accusations from the Trump administration that range from anti-Semitism to improper support for diversity, equity and inclusion programmes. In some cases, the government has used the threat of funding cuts to extract concessions and hundreds of millions of dollars from universities.

In 2024, UCLA was the site of one of the nation’s biggest protests against the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip. The demonstrations prompted claims from across the political spectrum that the university did not do enough to protect Jewish students or pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

On July 29, the university agreed to pay more than US$6 million to settle a lawsuit from Jewish students and a professor who said that the university had allowed a hostile protest on campus. After the settlement was announced, the Department of Justice separately said that it had found the university violated civil rights laws by failing to respond to students’ complaints of anti-Semitism.

Although the Trump administration intensified its attacks on UCLA this week, the school had been a target of the government’s scrutiny for more than a year. In May 2024, Dr Frenk’s predecessor Gene D. Block testified before a congressional committee examining campus anti-Semitism. And in February, a Trump administration task force on anti-Semitism identified UCLA as one of 10 schools it intended to visit as it investigated whether “remedial action is warranted”.

In recent weeks, UCLA would not say whether any of the task force’s investigators had been to the campus.

Dr Frenk said in his statement on July 30 that UCLA had taken “concrete action” to address anti-Semitism and discrimination, including creating a new office of campus safety.

“This far-reaching penalty of defunding life-saving research does nothing to address any alleged discrimination,” he wrote.

He called the cuts a “loss for Americans across the nation” whose work and health rely on the university’s research.

The funding cut is an early test for Dr Frenk, who became chancellor in January, as well as Mr James B. Milliken, who took over as the University of California (UC) system’s leader on Aug 1.

State and education leaders have been deeply concerned about the possibility that the Trump administration would target the university system as a whole, but especially the campuses in Los Angeles and Berkeley.

Both schools were on the anti-Semitism task force’s list for potential visits. But the Department of Education has also said it was investigating accusations of anti-Semitism at several other UC campuses. NYTIMES