The university is the first public institution to combat targeted government funding freezes.
Columbia University will pay $200 million deals with Trump administrators
Columbia University has reached an agreement with the Trump administration to restore federal funding.
The University of California, Los Angeles, is negotiating with the federal government to suspend more than $5 billion in research funds, according to the school.
UCLA Prime Minister Julio Frenk said in an August 6 message to campus communities that roughly $584 million has been suspended. James Milicken, president of the University of California System, said the school has pledged to “engage in dialogue with the federal administration” in hopes of ending the freeze “as soon as possible.”
On July 29, the Department of Justice notified UCLA that it had violated federal civil rights laws and allowed discrimination against Jews and Israeli students to occur if they were unable to properly respond to the protest in the spring of 2024 due to the Israeli Hama War.
Since then, grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and other federal agencies have been blocked, putting university research equipment at risk.
“This broad penalty in life-saving research does nothing to address suspicious discrimination,” Frenk said in a July 31 statement.
The funding freeze reflects similar behavior the federal government has taken with other prestigious universities in recent weeks and months, prompting a series of unprecedented agreements with schools such as Columbia and Brown. However, UCLA was the first major public institution, and its research support appeared on the Trump administration’s crosshairs.
Zachary Schermele is an education reporter for USA Today. You can contact him by email at zschermele@usatoday.com. Follow him on X at @Zachschermele and follow Bluesky at @Zachschermele.bsky.social.
