The lawsuit was filed by five UC Berkeley staff members and one at UC San Francisco, all of whom recently lost funding, according to the suit.
Her interactive museum at UC Berkeley lost over $6 million from nine grant cancellations, according to the suit.
Ken Alex, director of Project Climate, UC Berkeley Law’s initiative to advance solutions to global warming, is another plaintiff.
The EPA declined to comment on funding for UC Berkeley but said it continues to invest in research “to advance the mission of protecting human health and the environment.” The Trump administration’s impact on UC Berkeley goes beyond funding cuts.
Polsky and others organized demonstrations against the funding cuts this semester — unusual for faculty members, even at a hotbed of activism like Berkeley.
Berkeley, California. — In what they hope will be a first-of-its-kind class action lawsuit, researchers and faculty from the University of California filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump and a number of federal agencies late Wednesday, protesting the administration’s massive cuts to research funding.
According to the lawsuit, the wave of grant terminations has led to layoffs and halted a number of projects, from an attempt to make all of Mark Twain’s work publicly available to studies on the effects of wildfire smoke.
It was filed in the U.S. A. Claudia Polsky, the founding director of the University of California, Berkeley’s environmental law clinic, is the driving force behind the District Court in San Francisco. Despite not having experienced funding cuts herself, she claimed that she was motivated to rally colleagues to bring a lawsuit that might have a big impact on other academics across the country without any institutional support.
“I firmly believe that the faculty will eventually need to defend themselves,” Polsky, who is also one of the lawyers involved in the case, and Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of UC Berkeley Law, said.
The administration of Donald Trump is directly targeting the University of California system. In addition to reducing research funding that it considered superfluous, the administration has charged UC with not doing enough to combat antisemitism on campus.
Senior Justice Department attorney Leo Terrell, who is in charge of the federal antisemitism task force looking into the UC system, told Fox News late last month that the UC system and other colleges would face “massive lawsuits.”.
According to a UC system representative, the administration is working with the system. The University of California is committed to combating and eliminating antisemitism in all of its manifestations throughout the institution because it detests it. “”.
With ten campuses, the UC system is responsible for about 8% of all academic research in the nation. Five employees from UC Berkeley and one from UC San Francisco filed the lawsuit, alleging that they were all recently cut off from funding. It charges a number of government organizations with disobeying federal laws and violating the researchers’ rights to free speech and due process by denying them funding for their studies because of dubious financial concerns or because of their subject matter and by not taking the necessary legal actions.
“These cuts could hinder life-saving biomedical research and cripple U. A. economic competitiveness and endanger the health of Americans who rely on innovative and state-of-the-art medical science,” a university system spokesman, Stett Holbrook, stated in an email. The processing of grant appeals is done on an individual basis. “”.
Stetson University in Florida’s Center for Excellence in Higher Education Law and Policy director, Peter Lake, believes that legal action by university employees is beneficial.
“That the professors themselves are stakeholders and that it’s not just the institutions alone makes a really powerful statement,” he said. It’s a way of saying, ‘Well, we’ll arrive at the battlefield first if you’re slow. “.”.
The University of California schools received a total of $4 billion in federal research funding last year, making them some of the biggest recipients in academia.
Additionally, they have been severely impacted by the cuts. Although the precise amount of losses suffered by colleges in California and elsewhere is hard to measure, UC officials have stated that the losses amount to hundreds of millions of dollars, which is why they implemented a hiring freeze in February.
The lawsuit names 16 federal agencies as defendants, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Agriculture, Education, Health and Human Services, State, and Transportation, as well as President Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USDA, NSF, EPA, and U.S. S. . Regarding ongoing litigation, the Department of the Interior stated that they do not comment. When asked to comment on the lawsuit, the other agencies did not immediately reply.
Early in his presidency, Trump issued executive orders instructing government agencies to stop funding green energy projects and programs that were thought to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. Additionally, the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency terminated numerous grants from numerous federal agencies that it deemed unnecessary. Researchers who had previously been granted funding and were frequently in the middle of multi-year studies received notices from government officials at various departments that their funding would be immediately discontinued. Injunctions stopped some cuts, but many remain in place.
Although researchers can typically appeal to the agencies for the cancellation of their individual grants, Polsky likened this to “attempting to prop individual trees back up when the entire forest is being lit on fire.”. Additionally, the Trump administration might impose additional requirements on even successful appeals.
The plaintiffs include Jedda Foreman, director of the Center for Environmental Learning at the Lawrence Hall of Science among others. The lawsuit claims that nine grant cancellations cost her interactive museum at UC Berkeley more than $6 million. For example, she said that some NSF funding went to projects that aimed to increase interest in science education in various communities.
However, the NSF said it canceled some awards because they were “not in alignment with current NSF priorities.” The agency declined to comment on the terminations. “”.
Professor of history Christine Philliou, another lead plaintiff, lost a $250,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant to research Greek Orthodox Christians in Turkey during the 19th century. My team was “flabbergasted” when it was canceled in April, she said, with no explanation other than that the agency’s priorities had shifted. Requests for comments from the National Endowment for the Humanities were not answered.
“We had this grant; they can’t just take it at the last minute,” Philliou stated, adding that they adhered to the rule of law.
Another plaintiff is Ken Alex, director of Project Climate, UC Berkeley Law’s effort to promote solutions to global warming. He was in the middle of a three-year study that was sponsored by the EPA and used robots and drones to search for less expensive ways to monitor methane emissions from landfills, which are a major cause of climate change.
But in late April, Alex’s funding was terminated by the EPA. Similar to a lot of stop-work orders, it only stated that the study no longer satisfies government priorities.
Although it declined to comment on UC Berkeley’s funding, the EPA stated that it still funds research “to further the mission of protecting human health and the environment.”. “.”.
Funding reductions are not the only effect of the Trump administration on UC Berkeley.
The Education Department is looking into UC Berkeley’s finances in addition to a federal investigation into how the UC system handled claims of antisemitic incidents. Additionally, university administrators have been asked to provide the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission with information regarding over 800 faculty members who have signed open letters regarding student activism against Israel’s strikes on Gaza. One or both of the agencies have already called a number of them.
Professors are tense on account of the scrutiny. This semester, Polsky and other activists planned protests against the funding cuts, which is uncommon for academics, even at a center of activism like Berkeley. Additionally, the Academic Senate passed a resolution advising the school administration to oppose any invasive reform requests from the government.
Poulomi Saha, an associate professor of English at UC Berkeley and one of the faculty members who organized rallies, said, “I have never seen this much faculty agreement about anything, period, in my twelve years at Berkeley.”.
It could be made available to any other UC researchers or faculty whose funding has been similarly cut off since Trump’s return to office if the lawsuit is successful in getting certified as a class action, a process that typically takes months.
