LISTEN TO THIS ARTICLE Play Pause Skip backwardsGo ten seconds backward Skip forwardsGo ten seconds forward Progress 1.0x Mute Unmute Volume is at 50% 00:00 05:49 1.0x Audio is AI-generated. Report an issue | Give feedback Launching a new front in the White House’s battle with U.S. higher education, the National Science Foundation (NSF) yesterday informed the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) that nearly 300 of its grants would be “suspended until further notice.” In a letter to Chancellor Julio Frenk obtained by Science, the agency accused UCLA of “failing to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias.” The suspended NSF grants, a list of which Science obtained from an agency source, span work from computer science and plasma physics to the measurement of volatile compounds created by this year’s Los Angeles fires. The move marks the first known NSF grant suspensions or terminations since April and May, when the agency canceled more than 1600 grants worth about $1.5 billion, including nearly 200 to researchers at Harvard University. An analysis by Grant Witness, a volunteer effort to track funding changes, finds the UCLA suspensions amount to about $180 million, with half of the money not yet delivered to the scientific teams. In an open letter posted yesterday, Frenk stated that other agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), had also suspended some of its grants to UCLA researchers. NIH provided UCLA with more than $500 million in 2024. Today, The Daily Caller reported that the Department of Energy was also among the agencies suspending UCLA grants. (Science has learned that nearly 500 NIH grants and two DOE grants to UCLA have been frozen.) The suspensions follow a 29 July finding by the Department of Justice (DOJ) that the school violated antidiscrimination statutes of the Civil Rights Act’s Title VI by “creating a hostile educational environment for Jewish and Israeli students.” (On Wednesday, President Donald Trump’s administration froze $108 million of NIH funding to Duke Health, the medical research arm of Duke University, for “systemic racial discrimination.”) SIGN UP FOR THE AWARD-WINNING SCIENCEADVISER NEWSLETTER The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily Sign up NSF did not directly answer Science’s question of how its UCLA grant terminations were related to the DOJ finding. “The agency is suspending awards to UCLA because they are not in alignment with current NSF priorities and/or programmatic goals,” a spokesperson said. And NIH’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, said in a statement, “We will not fund institutions that promote antisemitism. We will use every tool we have to ensure institutions follow the law.” In his open letter, Frenk wrote, “This is not only a loss to the researchers who rely on critical grants. It is a loss for Americans across the nation whose work, health, and future depend on the groundbreaking work we do.” Frenk, whose Jewish family fled Nazi Germany, also addressed the allegations of antisemitism that followed fractious protests at UCLA about Israel’s invasion of the Gaza Strip. “Antisemitism has no place on our campus, nor does any form of discrimination,” he wrote. “UCLA has taken robust actions to make our campus a safe and welcoming environment for all students.” Advertisement Several scientists whose grants are listed as suspended had not received official confirmation when Science contacted them yesterday. Judea Pearl, a UCLA computer scientist who has been publicly critical of campus protests, is the co–principal investigator of a $1.2 million suspended grant to apply genetics to large-scale electronic health records. Most of the funding has been spent, Pearl says, adding, “I’ve been a principal investigator for NSF for maybe 50 years, so I’ll be very upset if my grant gets cut.” Nearly one-quarter of the suspended NSF grants fund computer science. “It’s unfair,” Pearl says. “They should look into the [UCLA] departments that have been delinquent in antisemitism.” According to Grant Witness, 38 of the suspended grants were CAREER awards, a prestigious award for promising early-career researchers. An additional 83 were collaborative grants between UCLA researchers and other institutions. The suspensions landed perhaps most heavily in math. NSF suspended a $25 million grant for the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM), an international center at UCLA that hosts about 2000 visiting researchers every year for workshops and other programs. One of its stars, Terence Tao, a Fields Medal winner frequently named as one of the greatest living mathematicians, also had his only NSF grant suspended. The $750,000 award was in its first year and supported Tao’s own research and a handful of graduate students in developing tools to tell whether a set of numbers is structured or random. Tao says he now cannot offer research assistant opportunities during the academic year, and he calls the cuts to IPAM “quite disastrous.” Tao’s ultimate goal is to use the tools to solve the twin primes conjecture, a centuries-old problem in number theory that suggests there are an infinite number of prime pairs that differ by two, like five and seven. But the NSF grant provided the vast majority of outside support for his UCLA salary. “I’m currently doing summer research unfunded,” he says. In June, Tao gave an online talk on the twin primes conjecture as part of Scientific Webinars in Solidarity with Palestine. “Sometimes you wonder what’s the point of doing mathematics in such a time,” he said to the virtual audience. “But at least one thing that mathematics offers is that it’s at least one place where we can actually resolve even very bitter disputes.” Update (11:40 am 8/2/25): Information has been added on National Institutes of Health and Department of Energy grants suspended at UCLA.