Trump Administration Plans to Cut Federal Funding to California

Earlier this week the Trump administration threatened to fine California after a trans athlete won several track events at the state final competition for girls. Today, CNN is reporting that the administration is indeed working on a plan to cut off federal funding to California, not unlike what the administration has done to Harvard. Details remain sketchy so it’s hard to tell if the target here is the entire state or just the state’s university system.

The Trump administration is preparing to cancel a large swath of federal funding for California, an effort which could begin as soon as Friday, according to multiple sources.

Agencies are being told to start identifying grants the administration can withhold from California. On Capitol Hill, at least one committee was told recently by a whistleblower that all research grants to the state were going to be cancelled, according to one of the sources familiar with the matter.

The report goes on to quote Rep. Darrell Issa who said, “Every university, every research organization, pretty much I saw them passing through here the last two days.”

The SF Chronicle seems to be hearing the same thing about imminent cuts, possibly focused on the UC system.

California officials were bracing Friday for a potential major escalation in President Donald Trump’s efforts to starve the state of federal funding, including possibly the elimination of money for the University of California, sources said.

Sources told the Chronicle that the state has not received official notification of the cuts, and it was not immediately clear which grants might be targeted or how widespread they might be. State Sen. Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, said he has been on alert about UC funding in particular. The Trump administration launched an investigation into the university system in March over allegations of antisemitism on the school’s campuses…

“We don’t know exactly what they’re going to do and when they’re going to do it, but we’ve been bracing ourselves for a while for Trump to go after UC,” he said. “This has nothing to do with antisemitism and everything to do with Trump’s desire to go after higher education. …Trump doesn’t care about jews or antisemitism, he only cares about his own power. They are on a methodical quest to destroy higher education in this country.”

It’s not clear where everyone is getting their information, but it seems that DOJ counsel Leo Terrell has been warning for weeks the UC system would be the next target. This report is from last week:

Leo Terrell, senior counsel at the Department of Justice (DOJ) and head of its newly formed antisemitism task force, announced on Fox News Tuesday that UC will be the next target. “There will be massive lawsuits against [the] UC system” and other institutions “on the East Coast, on the West Coast, in the Midwest,” Terrell said. “Expect hate crime charges filed by the federal government. Expect Title VII lawsuits.”

This marks the first time the Trump administration has publicly named a state university as a potential legal target in its broader effort to reshape higher education—an effort critics say is politically motivated and disproportionately aimed at institutions perceived as liberal strongholds.

Terrell told the Jewish News Service the same thing:

He told JNS that the administration plans to file a lawsuit against the entire University of California system, which has 10 campuses, including its flagship in Berkeley and UCLA…

Terrell’s task force announced a probe of UCLA in March, which aimed to assess whether the university “has engaged in a pattern or practice of discrimination based on race, religion and national origin against its professors, staff and other employees by allowing an antisemitic hostile work environment to exist on its campuses,” it stated.

The resistance to this is already shaping up. Yesterday NBC News reported a new class action lawsuit brought by UC Berkeley.

University of California faculty members and researchers filed suit against President Donald Trump and several federal agencies late Wednesday in what they hope will become a first-of-its-kind class action challenging the administration’s sweeping cuts to research funding…

The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, is the brainchild of Claudia Polsky, founding director of the environmental law clinic at the University of California, Berkeley. Though she didn’t face funding cuts herself, she said she felt inspired to organize colleagues — without any institutional backing — to file a suit that could have significant implications for other academics nationwide. 

“I really think the faculty are ultimately going to have to stand up for themselves,” said Polsky, who is also one of the attorneys on the case, along with UC Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky.

So there you have it. Berkeley is going to lead the west coast resistance, the same way that Harvard has on the east coast. But of course that hasn’t worked out too well for Harvard thus far. We’ll probably have to wait and see how this shakes out in court. 

If there is an update this afternoon, such as a new announcement by the Trump administration, I’ll add it below.