A few days ago, the Trump administration issued a 123-page report heralding a “new golden age” for U.S. science.
The key, said the report, published in the name of Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, was to ensure that the approval of federal research grants “rests purely on merit, not the political fashions of the day.”
There isn’t much to say about this goal, other than that the White House has some nerve. For years, dating back to the first Trump administration, I have been documenting all the steps Trump and his minions have taken to undermine American science.
Thanks to a group of University of California researchers who have gone to court to fight Trump’s cancellation of their research grants, we now have the most explicit confessions by six federal agencies about how slipshod and partisan their actions have been.
They’re the departments of Defense, Energy and Transportation, and the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
All were required by court order to stipulate how they came to their decisions. Those stipulations were filed in federal court in San Francisco on July 15. Taken together, the government admitted that it used nonscientific considerations, AI screens and illegal or unconstitutional consideration to terminate billions of dollars in grants.
It may be unusual for such forthright admissions of wrongdoing to come from an administration not known for scrupulous rectitude. In this case and others like it, however, the government’s lawyers were under the gun of court orders to come clean.
“They admitted what was true,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school and lead counsel for the plaintiffs in the researchers’ lawsuit, told me. In any event, he added, “It’s not like the Trump administration was hiding what it was doing.”
The White House assault on scientific grants is an integral part of its general blitzkrieg on U.S. science. In a one-year retrospective on the current Trump term published in January, Nature counted 5,844 grants canceled or suspended by the National Institutes of Health, and 1,996 by the National Science Foundation.
The cancellations were disproportionately aimed at projects concerned with “misinformation, vaccine hesitancy, infectious diseases and research on people from under-represented ethnic and gender groups.”
Both the NIH and the NSF reduced the number of new grants it issued by about 25%, Nature found — strangling the pipeline of basic research that is crucial for seeding research and development by industry. The Environmental Protection Agency and NASA, both of which have been heavily involved in research on global warming, lost more than 20% of their staff during Trump’s first year.
Deep cuts also were imposed on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, perhaps accounting for the inability of America’s public health infrastructure to counteract the surge in measles cases and the eruption of cyclospora infections this year.
That brings us back to the stipulations the federal agencies filed in the UC researchers’ lawsuit. The researchers scored an early victory in the case in June 2025, when federal Judge Rita F. Lin granted them a preliminary injunction reinstating the terminated grants. Lin has scheduled a hearing for Oct. 20 on whether to make her injunction permanent and grant the researchers summary judgment against the government.
The agencies’ stipulations are part of the record Lin will consider then; they all include spreadsheets listing the terminated grants and the rationales for their terminations. In sum, they open a window into the administration’s ideological preoccupations.
The longest list — nearly 370 spreadsheet pages — was filed by the NIH, a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services. The agency fingered grants for termination by searching for keywords and phrases in their applications such as “workforce diversity,” “equity, diversity, inclusion,” “sexual orientation,” “scientific evidence,” and “health equity.”
Some grants, the NIH confessed, appeared on a list provided by DOGE, the purported budget-cutting department headed by Elon Musk. In general, the goal was to “terminate grants presumed to express viewpoints … that HHS-NIH no longer wished to subsidize.”
The National Science Foundation acknowledged that it relied in part on a three-page list of disfavored keywords and phrases provided by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.), such as “advocacy,” “climate action,” “racism” and “gender preference.” The National Endowment for the Humanities searched for terms such as “transgenderism,” “green new deal social engineering policies” and “environmental justice.”
The most notable and explicit confession, though perhaps the least surprising, came from the Department of Energy.
Referring to a list of grant terminations announced in October 2025, the agency admitted that it terminated or canceled 283 grants “solely” based on whether their recipients were in states that had cast its electoral college votes for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and had two Democratic senators. Meanwhile, 340 other grants from states that voted for Trump were left in place.
The agency said it didn’t rely on “programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction, or performance-based factors.” In other words, grants from blue states were cut simply because they originated in blue states.
The confession is unsurprising because the Department of Energy had made almost identical confessions in two previous federal lawsuits. In a case brought last year by the city of St. Paul, Minn., Energy Secretary Christ Wright acknowledged that seven grants were terminated based primarily on “whether the grantee was located in a ‘Blue State.’” Similar grants for red states were unaffected, he said. In January, federal Judge Amit P. Mehta of the District of Columbia ordered the grants reinstated.
The agency repeated the stipulation in a lawsuit brought this year by the American Institute of Chemical Engineers over 11 canceled grants. In June, Mehta ordered those grants reinstated.
Despite these confessions, department spokesman Ben Dietderich told me that “none of the termination decisions were based on political considerations.” He said that Wright had “explained this numerous times in briefings on Capitol Hill.”
In fact, Wright didn’t explain things so much as conduct a master class in weaseling. In an April 17 exchange with Rep. Mike Levin (D-San Juan Capistrano), for example, he said that the blue state versus red state discrepancy was “a timing question, not a decision question. … The selection of the decisions to be announced, not the decisions. … The decisions were nonpolitical.”
But of course the decisions, not the timing, were the subject of the stipulations.
What’s perplexing is why major U.S. institutions have been reluctant to take the battle to the administration themselves.
As I reported last year, the UC faculty won a significant victory over Trump when Lin ordered the restoration of some $600 million in funding cuts and blocked a $1.2-billion fine the White House proposed to levy on UCLA for purported civil rights violations. (The White House abandoned its appeal of Lin’s order in February.)
But UC as an institution played no direct part in that case or any of the others brought to challenge Trump’s assault on the university.
“The University regularly evaluates its legal strategy, including in light of last week’s disclosures, and takes action when it is in the best interests of UC, our community, and our state,” the office of UC President James B. Milliken told me by email.
It’s true that the university has signed on as a co-plaintiff in several lawsuits brought jointly by the Association of American Universities and two other associations representing big universities. In each case, however, it was nestled within a cloud of about a dozen other big institutions. The cases are really being run by the associations.
Among educational institutions, Chemerinsky points out, only Harvard has stood up for itself in court — and it has been successful, thus far. Meanwhile Columbia, Penn, Brown and others have made settlement deals.
“It’s very disappointing that universities have settled with the Trump administration rather than going to court — and I think they would have won,” he told me.
The same goes for other institutions that should have been expected to carry the fight: Nine major law firms targeted by Trump capitulated with settlements, but four firms have fought Trump and prevailed.
When the history of the Trump era is written, the institutional cowardice will deserve a chapter, and the courage of those that fought a chapter of their own.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik has written for the Los Angeles Times for more than 40 years