White House admits it used keywords related to diversity, gender and COVID-19 to kill billions worth of research grants

University of California Berkeley student Ariela Lara, centre, leads a chant as students hold signs while protesting the re-election of Donald Trump on the campus of the University of California Berkeley in Berkeley, Calif., on Nov. 15, 2024. (Godofredo A. Vásquez / AP Photo)

U.S. federal agencies that terminated more than a thousand research grants at the University of California last year admitted that they used keywords related to diversity, gender, vaccine hesitancy and COVID-19 to screen for projects that ran afoul of the Trump administration’s priorities.

It’s an admission that lawyers for the research professors say is proof that the agencies illegally cancelled nearly US$2 billion in grants. And that’s a major development in a lawsuit filed by UC researchers against the Trump administration to permanently get their grants back. The researchers’ legal team is now asking the judge in the case to skip a trial and formally declare that the White House repeatedly violated the constitution, including the First Amendment. A court hearing on whether that’ll happen is scheduled for Oct. 20.

The federal agencies made the admission about the keywords in signed stipulations filed in federal court last week in a case called Thakur v. Trump that’s been ongoing since last spring.

The stipulations in the court filing show the agencies “did not terminate any grants based on alleged noncompliance with the terms of the grant” and instead used “general criteria, rather than grant-specific assessment of each award’s compliance, or performance,” the lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote. Lawyers for the UC professors now contend that the admission proves three wide-ranging constitutional violations:

CalMatters emailed the U.S. Department of Justice, which acts as the legal defence for the federal agencies, on July 16 to ask whether it agrees that the federal grant-making agency stipulations mean the Trump administration violated the constitutional rights of researchers. A spokesperson for the Justice Department didn’t respond by publication time.

History of lawsuit

The judge in this case, Rita F. Lin, has repeatedly sided with the UC professors and issued several preliminary injunctions forcing the federal agencies to restore the grants while she reviews the full merits of the case. This includes the restoration of hundreds of grants at UCLA that the Trump administration sought to suspend over its allegations that the university tolerated antisemitism and permitted transgender women to compete on women’s sports teams.

Those allegations were also the subject of a demand from the White House for UCLA to pay $1.2 billion or experience an additional cascade of research freezes. However, months before Trump sought that settlement UCLA took steps to address antisemitism on campus, including commissioning a task force to recommend ways to create a more welcoming environment for Jewish students.

Lin, a Biden appointee, faulted the administration for disregarding those efforts by UCLA in a preliminary injunction for a different but related lawsuit. The Trump administration’s justification for terminating the grants did not “mention the remedial steps UCLA had already taken to address the issues described,” Lin wrote.

Lawyers for professors in the Thakur case now want Lin to make a final ruling ordering the grants to be restored, rather than a preliminary one. Even if that were to happen, the federal agencies could decide to appeal Lin’s ruling to a higher court. The stakes “are huge,” lawyers for the professors in the Thakur case wrote. If the White House is “allowed to terminate this funding, the researchers, graduate students, and program staff that relied on the grants to pursue their lives’ work will all suffer significant damage to their reputations and careers.”

The lawyers warn of lifesaving cures that will never be developed, new understandings of diseases that will go unexplored, and the decline in the country’s global standing as an international juggernaut in publicly funded research.

Using keywords to target disfavoured grants

The agencies admitted to using keywords in various ways, according to a CalMatters review of the new court filings.

The Department of Transportation identified six grants for projects worth about $42 million to terminate because they sought “transportation equity,” prioritized “disadvantaged communities,” or focused on “diversifying the transportation workforce” and “equity.”

The termination of three of those grants led by a UC Davis professor resulted in 77 researchers abandoning 79 in-progress projects. Lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote that the project leaders were also forced to lay off or scramble to replace funding for more than 40 graduate and undergraduate research assistants.

The National Institutes of Health admitted to using an internal search tool to flag UC grants that mentioned “health equity,” “work force diversity,” “structural racism,” and “sexual orientation.” The NIH alone suspended or cancelled more than 1,000 UC grants, including nearly 700 at UCLA, related to vaccines, cancer research and disparities in health outcomes. That figure is newly disclosed in a court filing — last year, UCLA indicated that closer to 500 NIH grants were terminated. The health research agency also declared that it’s possible that DOGE, the short-lived federal office that billionaire Elon Musk led in 2025, used AI to target grants for termination. Lawyers for the plaintiffs wrote to the judge that these admissions show the agencies “identified the viewpoints they wanted to suppress, searched the grants they funded for those that expressed those viewpoints, and terminated those grants on that basis.” That violates the researchers’ First Amendment rights, the lawyers wrote. The Environmental Protection Agency, one of the named agencies in the suit, is in the process of settling with lawyers for the UC professors to avoid further litigation.

A separate federal district judge in Massachusetts last week dealt the Trump administration a blow in its ability to terminate grants and withhold federal funding. The White House relied on a legal phrase in many of its funding cancellations — “no longer effectuates . . . agency priorities.” California and 22 other states sued, arguing that there’s no law or right for the federal government to cancel funding based on new program goals and White House desires after the grants were already awarded. The judge agreed.

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This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

Mikhail Zinshtey/calmatters, The Associated Press