Govind Tekale
Federal agencies have formally admitted in court that UC research grants were canceled using automated keyword searches — not scientific peer review — eliminating billions of dollars in funding at the University of California system. The admission appears in signed stipulations filed in a federal lawsuit called Thakur v. Trump, which has been working through the courts since last spring.
How UC Research Grants Were Canceled Through DEI Keyword Filters
The National Institutes of Health confirmed in court documents that it ran UC grant records through an internal search tool flagging applications that mentioned “health equity,” “work force diversity,” “structural racism,” and “sexual orientation.” Any grant containing those terms was treated as a candidate for cancellation. Using that method, the NIH alone suspended or terminated more than 1,000 UC grants — nearly 700 at UCLA — covering vaccine research, cancer studies, and work examining health disparities in underserved communities.
Across the full UC system, the canceled grants total nearly $2 billion. Other federal agencies made similar admissions in the same stipulations, acknowledging that grants related to gender, vaccine hesitancy, and COVID-19 were also filtered out using keyword searches. The consistency of the method across multiple agencies suggests a coordinated directive from the White House rather than independent decisions by individual program officers.
The practical effect was to eliminate entire research programs without any scientific justification. Laboratories that had spent years building out studies, recruiting participants, and training staff lost their funding because a search algorithm returned a match. In many cases, the research had no meaningful connection to the political debates the administration was responding to — the keyword appeared in a single sentence of a multi-year grant application.
Researchers and legal advocates filed suit challenging the cancellations as unconstitutional. Now that the government has acknowledged on the record how the decisions were made, the legal team in Thakur v. Trump is pressing the judge to bypass a full trial and issue a summary ruling declaring that the administration violated the U.S. Constitution, including the First Amendment’s protections against viewpoint-based government censorship of academic speech. A hearing on that request is set for October 20.
The implications reach well beyond the UC system. Federal grants from NIH, NSF, and other agencies fund a large share of the biomedical and public health research conducted at American universities. If courts allow the executive branch to use ideological keyword filters to override peer-review decisions, it sets a precedent that could shape how future administrations fund — or defund — science they find politically inconvenient.
Critics of the cuts have drawn parallels to other recent episodes of political interference in scientific institutions, including state-level removal of climate science from policy and law. Taken together, these cases reflect a pattern in which elected officials are using administrative power to control what government-funded researchers are allowed to study and say. The October hearing will be one of the most closely watched moments in federal science-funding law in years. If the judge grants summary judgment, it could unwind months of cancellations and force the restoration of hundreds of research programs across one of the country’s largest university systems.
