White House Admits to Using Keywords to Cancel Major California Research Grants

Federal agencies that pulled the plug on more than 1,000 research grants at the University of California last year have now acknowledged, in court filings, that they relied on keyword searches tied to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19 to flag projects that ran counter to the priorities of the Trump administration.

Attorneys representing UC researchers say the admission is significant — proof, in their view, that the agencies unlawfully stripped nearly $2 billion in funding. It marks a pivotal moment in the ongoing lawsuit brought by UC researchers against the Trump administration, who are fighting to get their grants restored for good. The researchers’ legal team is now asking a federal judge to skip a trial altogether and rule outright that the White House repeatedly violated the Constitution, including the First Amendment. A hearing on that request is set for October 20.

The keyword admissions came in stipulations signed and filed last week in federal court in a case known as Thakur v. Trump, which has been working its way through the system since last spring.

According to those stipulations, the agencies “did not rescind any grant for alleged noncompliance with the terms of the grant itself.” Instead, plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote, the agencies applied “generalized criteria, rather than grant-specific evaluation of compliance or performance.” Lawyers for the UC faculty argue this reveals three sweeping constitutional violations.

First, by running keyword searches across hundreds of grants and canceling them in bulk rather than reviewing each one on its individual merits, the administration effectively targeted research it viewed as politically unfavorable — a violation of the First Amendment.

Second, by canceling 283 Department of Energy grants in states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election while leaving similar grants untouched in Republican-leaning states, the administration unfairly punished researchers simply for living in states it opposed politically.

Third, by canceling billions in grants without redirecting that money toward other approved funding opportunities, the administration failed to spend federal research dollars the way Congress specifically directed through the laws it passed — a violation in its own right.

On July 16, CalMatters asked the U.S. Department of Justice, which is defending the federal agencies in court, whether it agreed that the stipulations amounted to an admission that the Trump administration violated researchers’ constitutional rights. A department spokesperson had not responded by the time of publication.

A history of legal setbacks for the administration

U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin has repeatedly sided with UC researchers throughout the case, issuing a string of preliminary orders forcing federal agencies to reinstate grants while she considers the underlying legal questions. That has included restoring hundreds of grants at UCLA that the administration tried to freeze over allegations that the university tolerated antisemitism and allowed transgender women to compete on women’s sports teams.

Those same allegations later fueled a White House demand that UCLA pay $1.2 billion or face another wave of research funding freezes. But months before that demand was made, UCLA had already taken steps to address antisemitism on campus, including forming a task force to recommend ways to make the campus more welcoming for Jewish students.

Lin, a Biden appointee, criticized the administration in a separate but related preliminary order for ignoring those efforts. She wrote that the government’s justification for canceling the grants made no mention of the corrective steps UCLA had already taken to address the very concerns it cited.

Attorneys for the professors in the Thakur case are now asking Lin to issue a final ruling ordering the grants restored, rather than another preliminary order. Even so, the federal government could still appeal any decision Lin makes to a higher court.

The plaintiffs’ attorneys wrote that the stakes are enormous. If the administration is allowed to pull this funding, they argued, “researchers, graduate students and program staff who depended on the grants to develop the work of their lifetimes will suffer significant harm to their reputations and their professional careers.”

The attorneys warned of potentially life-saving cures that may never be developed, new understanding of diseases that will go unexplored, and a decline in the nation’s standing as a global leader in publicly funded research.

Keyword searches used to flag disfavored grants

A CalMatters review of the newly filed court documents found that federal agencies used keyword searches in a variety of ways.

The Department of Transportation identified six grants worth roughly $42 million for cancellation because they sought to advance “transportation equity,” prioritized “disadvantaged communities,” or focused on “workforce diversification” in transportation and “equity” more broadly.

The cancellation of three of those grants, led by a UC Davis professor, forced 77 researchers to abandon 79 ongoing projects. Plaintiffs’ attorneys said the project leaders also had to lay off or scramble to find new funding for more than 40 graduate and undergraduate research assistants.

The National Institutes of Health admitted using an internal search tool to identify UC grants that referenced terms such as “health equity,” “workforce diversity,” “structural racism” and “sexual orientation.” NIH alone suspended or canceled more than 1,000 UC grants, including nearly 700 at UCLA, covering research on vaccines, cancer and disparities in health outcomes. That figure, recently disclosed in court filings, is notably higher than the roughly 500 NIH grant cancellations UCLA had previously reported last year. The health research agency also acknowledged that DOGE — the short-lived federal office once led by billionaire Elon Musk — may have used artificial intelligence to help identify grants for elimination.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys told the judge these admissions show that the agencies “identified the viewpoints they wanted to suppress, searched the grants they funded for those that expressed those viewpoints, and canceled those grants for that reason” — a direct violation of researchers’ First Amendment rights, they argued.

The Environmental Protection Agency, another defendant named in the case, is reportedly working toward a settlement with UC faculty attorneys to avoid further litigation.

Separately, a federal district judge in Massachusetts dealt the Trump administration a significant setback last week regarding its authority to cancel grants and withhold federal funding. The administration had leaned on a common legal justification for many of its funding cuts — that a grant “no longer effectuates agency priorities.” California and 22 other states sued, arguing there is no legal basis for the federal government to cancel already-awarded funding simply because the White House later decides it wants different program priorities. The judge agreed with the states.

Original source: CalMatters