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The University of California president said Wednesday that the Trump administration granted a total of $584 million suspension at UCLA, a “death confession” for medical, science and energy research, and encouraged negotiations with federal officials.
This figure represents more than half of the direct and indirect payments UCLA receives for federal grants and contracts each year. And it exceeds the amount of cash flow that was initially thought to be suspended last week when details were released about federal agency grants for campus grants for anti-Semitism allegations.
“This week, the University of California has agreed to engage in dialogue with the federal administration in response to a UCLA letter from the U.S. Department of Justice regarding the Title VI and Title VII investigation,” UC President James B. Milicken said in a statement Wednesday. Miliken said the negotiation goal was for “suspended and risky federal funding restored to the university as soon as possible.”
The Federal Civil Rights Act, Title VI and some of the Title VII prohibit discrimination based on shared ancestors, including race, gender and national origin, or Jewish and Israeli identities.
Miliken, who took on the UC top post on Friday, hit a firm tone at his message.
“These cuts do nothing to deal with anti-Semitism,” writes Milicken. Furthermore, the extensive work that UCLA and the entire University of California took to combat anti-Semitism appears to be clearly ignored.
The suspension of grants affecting research in areas such as neuroscience, clean energy, and cancer came after the Department of Justice and the US Atty. General Pam Bondy said on July 28 that UCLA will pay a “heavy price” to act with “intentional indifference” to the civil rights of Jews and Israeli students who have advocated anti-Semitism cases from October 7, 2023. In the spring of 2024, pro-Palestinian demonstrators built an encampment in the Lois Quad, demanding that UC sell it from arms and technology companies with ties to the war.
The Justice Department had told UCLA until August 5 whether to negotiate those findings. Otherwise, the letter to UC said the Trump administration would sue by September 2nd. The letter has started informing UCLA’s Julio Frenk that a huge portion of the university’s research companies must halt.
In total, at least 800 grants have been frozen.
The Times first reported its decision to negotiate with the federal government on Tuesday.
In addition to accusing UCLA of violating Jewish students’ rights, the Trump administration has argued that campuses use races that were illegally used in entry and allow transgender players to compete on sports teams that match their gender identity.
The allegations are similar to those lobbed against Harvard, Brown, Columbia and other Ivy League universities. Brown and Columbia recently came to a sweeping deal with the federal government to recover hundreds of millions of federal research funds.
In Brown’s case, the university plans to pay the state $50 million for use in workforce development programs. Columbia said it would pay more than $200 million to the federal government. Both schools also agreed to other terms, including sharing data on admissions with the Trump administration.
On Wednesday, Miliken did not mention any financial payments from UC or any other potential terms of the agreement with Trump.
Experts say payments are politically responsible for California’s deep blue colleges and state leaders, where Trump’s policies are not very popular. Depending on the cost, payments could be a financial burden for the university system, which is already facing employment freezes, budgetary scrutiny, state funding delays and scattered layoffs.
In a campus letter Wednesday, Frenk, who challenged the idea that Grant’s cuts were a proper response to anti-Semitism allegations, said if the suspension continues it would be “devastating for UCLA and Americans across the country.”
The cuts are “the loss of Americans across the country where work, health and the future rely on our groundbreaking research and scholarships,” he said.
“We do everything we can to protect the interests of our faculty, students and staff and to adhere to our values and principles. The UC Regent Committee and the President’s UC office provide advice in actively assessing our best course of action.”
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