UC researchers ask judge to block Department of Energy from terminating grants

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — A federal judge indicated Thursday that she was leaning toward extending a previous injunction blocking the Trump administration from terminating University of California research grants from several federal agencies, including the Department of Energy.

U.S. District Judge Rita Lin said the DOE’s termination of billions in grants en masse in October used similar form letters the judge previously enjoined the administration from using, calling the cases “basically identical to what I dealt with before.”

“I don’t see a distinction between the claim here and the situation we dealt with in the past,” she said.

However, the Joe Biden appointee seemed skeptical of the plaintiff’s argument that the targeted termination of DOE research grants in “blue” states where the majority of the population did not vote for President Donald Trump in the 2024 election violated the equal protection clause.

“I understand from the administration’s perspective that they terminated grants because they supported the Left’s climate agenda,” she said, reading a social media post from Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought that stated “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.”

“That phrasing sounds to me like the government is saying ‘We don’t believe this is a good use of taxpayer money to fund the grants that seek to reduce carbon in the climate,” she said. “Why isn’t that a legitimate govt interest?”

Claudia Polsky of the UC Berkeley School of Law, an attorney for the plaintiffs, argued the Trump administration was free to pursue different policies than past administrations, but the grants targeted for termination contradicted the government’s stated priorities and were terminated exclusively because of the political affiliation of the grantees.

She added that the decision-making process to terminate grants was “infected to the core with partisan animus” and that many of the grants targeted were “substantively identical,” but only the ones located in blue states were terminated.

“You can see the projects are absolutely identical, but the fact that some occur in blue states and some occur in red states gets different treatment,” she said.

Lin questioned whether political affiliation was allowed to be a factor at all in other political decisions, such as Congress weighing the political affiliation of Senators when determining grants to cut.

Polsky responded that it was not a legitimate government interest to “punish your opponents to get your way” and that this case was about executive, not congressional, action.

In contrast, the government argued it was not unlawful to base a decision on grant terminations on political considerations.

Department of Justice attorney Jason Altabet said that the government is allowed to make over-inclusive generalizations, such as that research projects in blue states are more likely to have policy interests against the priorities of the Trump administration.

“For example, the administration here is interested in oil and gas, and generally speaking, projects in blue states are going to be interested in solar and renewable energy,” he said.

Polsky rebutted that the government was trying to set up a system where “you are only eligible for federal money, prospectively and retrospectively, if your state voted for the winner in the last presidential election.”

As for Lin’s question on why the government could not make the argument that grant terminations in blue states further its agenda in other legislation, Polsky said that “if the government were making a rational decision to eliminate expenditures, they would not terminate low-dollar grants in blue states while leaving high-dollar grants in red states.”

Lin did not specify when a ruling would come out.

After the hearing, Polsky told Courthouse News that they “never speculate about how the judge will rule” but expect a ruling within a week based on Lin’s prior decisions.

“We are hopeful that the Department of Energy UC researchers will have good news for the holidays,” she said.

A representative for the DOJ declined to comment.

The plaintiffs are six UC researchers who sued after losing their multiyear grants from the Environmental Protection Agency, National Endowment for the Humanities and National Science Foundation. Their projects addressed issues like wildfire smoke-related health risks in marginalized communities, landfill methane emissions and racial equity in STEM education.

Lin previously ruled in June that the federal government’s cancellation of research grants for reasons related to diversity, equity and inclusion likely violated the First Amendment and granted a preliminary injunction vacating the federal agencies’ terminations of the class members’ grants.

The judge also provisionally certified two classes of UC researchers: one consisting of researchers who lost their grants due to DEI and one whose grants were terminated without any specific explanation.

In September, Lin extended the injunction to include a group of researchers whose grants from the Department of Defense, the Department of Transportation or the Department of Health and Human Services, through the National Institutes of Health, were terminated by a “form termination notice” that did not provide a specific explanation for the termination.

However, the judge only widened the injunction covering grants that were terminated due to researching blacklisted diversity, equity and inclusion topics, to those terminated by the Department of Transportation.

Plaintiffs filed an additional request for an injunction in November after the DOE began grant terminations on Oct. 1, targeting projects researching clean energy, specifically located in states where the majority population did not vote for Trump in the 2024 election.

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