“These cuts threaten to suffocate biomedical research that save lives, limit the economic competitiveness of the United States and endangers the health of Americans who depend on medical science and avant -garde innovation,” said Stett Holbrook, a spokesman for the university system, in an email. “Appeals for subsidies are handled case by case.”
Peter Lake, director of the Center for Excellence in the Law and Policy of Higher Education of the University of Stetson in Florida, sees a benefit for legal actions that come from university staff members.
“It is a really powerful statement that teachers themselves are interested and that they are simply not the institutions alone,” he said. “It is a way of saying: ‘Well, if you are slow for the battlefield, we will arrive first.'”
The schools of the University of California are some of the largest receptors of federal research funds in the academy; They received $ 4 billion cumulatively last year.
And they have been beaten strongly by the cuts. Although it is difficult to track exactly the amount of universities, in California or other places, they have lost, the UC administrators have said that it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars and that led them to impose a freezing of hiring in February.
The lawsuit appoints President Trump, the government efficiency department and 16 federal agencies, including national health institutes; the departments of agriculture, education, health and human services, state and transport; the National Science Foundation; and the Environmental Protection Agency, as accused. The EPA, the USDA, NSF, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Department of Interior of the United States said they do not comment on pending litigation. The other agencies did not immediately respond to requests for comments on the demand.
At the beginning of his presidency, Trump signed executive orders that ordered the government offices to end the funds for programs that are considered promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, together with green energy initiatives. The government efficiency department led by Elon Musk also canceled a strip of subsidies in many federal agencies that considered a waste. Government officials in multiple departments sent notices to researchers who had already been approved to receive subsidies and who were often in the midst of several years investigations that their funds would be cut immediately. Some cuts were blocked by mandates, but many are still standing.
Researchers can generally appeal their individual cancellations of subsidies to the agencies, but Polsky compared such appeals with “trying to remove individual trees when the whole forest is being lit.” And even successful appeals can come with new attached conditions by the Trump administration.
Jedda Foreman, director of the Environmental Learning Center at the Lawrence Science Hall, is one of the plaintiffs. His interactive museum at UC Berkeley lost more than $ 6 million of nine subsidy cancellations, according to the demand. Some funds from the NSF, for example, supported projects aimed at expanding interest in scientific education in different communities, he said.
The NSF declined to comment on the endings, but said it canceled some awards because “they were not aligned with the current NSF priorities.”
Another main plaintiff, History professor Christine Philliou, lost a national subsidy of national endowment of $ 250,000 for the subsidy of humanities to study Greek orthodox Christians in the 18th century Türkiye. He was canceled in April without any more explanation than the agency’s priorities had changed, leaving his team “amazed,” he said. The national endowment for the humanities did not respond to requests for comments.
“We believed in the rule of law and felt: ‘Well, we have this subsidy; they can’t simply take it at the last minute,” said Philliou.
Ken Alex, director of Project Climate, the initiative of UC Berkeley Law to advance the solutions to global warming, is another plaintiff. He had been in the middle of a three -year study, financed by the EPA, using drones and robots to find cheaper ways to monitor methane emissions of landfills, an important taxpayer to climate change.
But the EPA cut Alex’s funds at the end of April. Like many of the stop orders, I only said that the study no longer meets government priorities.
The EPA refused to comment on the funds for UC Berkeley, but said it continues to invest in research “to advance the mission of protecting human health and the environment.”
The impact of the Trump administration on UC Berkeley goes beyond the fund cuts.
In addition to a federal investigation of how the UC system addressed the accusations of anti -Semitic incidents, the Department of Education is investigating the finances of UC Berkeley. And the Employment Equal Opportunities Commission has demanded and received information from university administrators about more than 800 members of the Faculty who signed open letters on student activism against Israel’s attacks in Gaza. Several have already received calls from one or both agencies.
The scrutiny has put teachers to the limit. Polsky and others organized demonstrations against fund cuts, unusual for the members of the Faculty, even in a focus of activism such as Berkeley. The academic Senate also approved a resolution that urges the school administration to resist any intrusive demand of the Reform Government.
“Never in the 12 years that I have been in Berkeley I have seen this agreement of the Faculty on anything, point,” said Poulomi Saha, an associate professor of English at UC Berkeley, one of the members of the faculty that organized demonstrations.
If the demand survives to be certified as a collective claim, a process that usually has been opened for months Any other member of the Faculty of the UC or researchers whose financing has been a similarly rescued since Trump returned to office.
