Editors note: This piece was updated Aug. 5 at 10:53 p.m. to replace a passage that appears to have been improperly appropriated from another news organization.
The federal government has suspended around 9% of UCLA’s National Institutes of Health grants and blocked the university from receiving new awards, UCLA administrators said at a virtual town hall Monday.
About 3,000 people attended the town hall, which was led by Vice Chancellor for Research and Creative Activities Roger Wakimoto. The federal government suspended around 800 research grants effective July 30 or 31 – including about 300 from the National Science Foundation, 500 from the National Institutes of Health and three from the United States Department of Energy.
[Related: About 800 NIH, NSF research grants suspended following UCLA federal funding cuts]
The move to suspend UCLA’s federal research funding followed a July 29 U.S. Department of Justice notice which alleged that UCLA failed to properly respond to complaints of antisemitism on campus following Palestinian political party and militant group Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, which killed around 1,200 people. The DOJ added that UCLA violated federal civil rights law during the Palestine solidarity encampment, which pro-Palestine protesters set up to demand that the UC divest from companies associated with the Israeli military.
[Related: Federal government suspends research funding to UCLA]
Protests erupted on UCLA’s campus following the start of the Israel-Hamas war that followed the Oct. 7 attacks and has killed over 60,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
“We are the first public institution that has been targeted by this administration,” Wakimoto said during the town hall.
The Trump administration has previously withheld funding from universities – such as Harvard University and Columbia University – for allegedly allowing antisemitism on their campuses. Columbia agreed to pay a $200 million fine to the Trump administration July 23 to settle antisemitism allegations and restore its federal funding, while Harvard is currently in negotiations to restore its frozen dollars, according to The New York Times.
During the town hall, Wakimoto said the letters from the federal government cited several reasons for suspending the grants – which included but were not limited to engaging in illegal affirmative action practices, failing to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and “allowing men to participate in women’s sports.”
Wakimoto said in a Friday email that all researchers whose grants have been suspended must immediately stop spending their funding. During the town hall, Wakimoto also said the suspension does not terminate the frozen awards, adding that grants not included on the list of suspended grants are currently unaffected.
Wakimoto said John Mazziotta, the vice chancellor of UCLA Health Sciences and chief executive officer of UCLA Health, looked at the university’s awards from the NIH and identified trends.
“There was avoidance of frozen awards that support clinical trials,” Wakimoto said during the town hall. “I suspect that’s because there’s a large public interest in clinical trials, and there was a suspension of training grants.”
Marcia Smith, the associate vice chancellor for research administration, said roughly 9% of the NIH grants received by UCLA were suspended, adding that she was unsure about the exact percentage of NSF and DOE awards to the university represented in the freeze. She also said new awards will not be granted to UCLA during the suspension period.
Wakimoto said administrators originally believed new proposals could be submitted during the suspension, but the federal government later instructed UCLA to withdraw a submitted proposal.
UCLA administrators are preparing to contact the federal agencies that have frozen funding about “what kinds of information they need in order to lift the suspensions,” Smith said. She added that she was “very hopeful” that UCLA would find a solution to resume grant funding.
The university will have to submit a financial report for each of the suspended grants’ expenditures through July 31 within 30 days of the notice, Smith said. The reports will require expenditures to first be compiled by principal investigators and department fund managers and then sent to the Extramural Fund Management – which provides financial management support for research projects – for review and approval.
Wakimoto said the Office of Campus Counsel – UCLA’s in-house legal office – has warned against submitting administrative appeals regarding the suspended grants as there could be “consequences for other grants and future actions that the university may take.”
Michael Beck, UCLA’s administrative vice chancellor, said during the town hall that employment and layoff decisions will be up to the discretion of individual labs. He encouraged labs to try and find alternative paths – such as private funding – for paying its staff.
Beck also said given the uncertainty surrounding the freeze, labs should attempt to maintain their current operations as more information comes in.
Wakimoto said the university does not know whether the federal government will issue more funding suspensions going forward. He also said that prior decisions have been made by the federal government without informing program officers, who are liaisons between researchers and the NIH.
He added that the role of principal investigators and staff’s involvement in the decision-making process – particularly with regard to the “potential philosophical or academic compromises UCLA may need to make as part of the response” to the suspension – is currently unclear, adding that he is unsure if he will be consulted by the UC Board of Regents.
Senior leadership from across the UC expressed solidarity with UCLA at a Friday meeting, Wakimoto said.
“We’re not alone,” he said. “We have some very good friends in the system that want to address the challenges with us and lock arms with us.”
Comments are closed.