Newsom rejects settlement to restore funding to UCLA, vows to ‘fight like hell’ against Trump admin
Trump administration sought to force UCLA to end race-based scholarships and gender-affirming care in exchange for restoring frozen funding
UCLA risks losing $584M in research funds as Newsom rejects Trump’s $1B settlement
California Gov. Gavin Newsom rejected the Trump administration’s $1 billion settlement offer, which would have restored hundreds of millions in federal research grants to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), calling it “political extortion” and vowing legal resistance.
The dispute comes after a freeze on approximately $584 million in federal funding, which the Department of Justice imposed amid questions about UCLA’s handling of anti-Israel protests during the last two years.
Newsom, joined by several Democratic state officials, condemned the proposed settlement as a “billion-dollar political shakedown” of the University of California system, stressing his emphatic refusal to cooperate with the Trump administration’s terms.
“UCLA is not going to sell their soul like Harvard or Brown or Penn or Columbia,” Newsom said. “Shame on all of them. We’re not. And we’re going to fight like hell to protect our democracy, our liberties, our freedoms.”
[RELATED: ‘UCLA raked in billions from feds while pushing DEI, anti-Israel ideology: REPORT’]
Under the proposed settlement, UCLA would be required to abandon a wide range of practices promoting Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), such as race-based scholarships and “gender-affirming care,” and comply with new monitoring and data-sharing obligations.
The University of California at large self-reports to be the recipient of the most federally sponsored research activity among US institutions of higher education. It receives over $4 billion in federally sponsored research activity expenditures across its ten campuses.
Within the University of California alone, UCLA received $750 million in federal research awards in the 2024 federal fiscal year. That’s about 46 percent of its total $1.63 billion in research funding.
Columbia and Brown, both private universities, have reached multi-million-dollar settlements with the Trump administration. Harvard remains in ongoing negotiations.
Newsom also condemned Harvard administrators’ cooperation with federal authorities so far, warning that further compliance would require them to “sell [their] soul.”
“And let me make this crystal clear to everyone watching and make it crystal clear to the folks at Harvard,” Newsom said. “We will never ever sell our soul to Donald Trump. Harvard, I pray you are listening. How could you? Of all institutions, on tens of billions of dollars, what’s the point of your damn endowment if you cannot stand on principle?”
As previously reported by Campus Reform, Newsom’s promise to “fight like hell” against the federal government evidently may include a lawsuit against the administration’s alleged “extortion.”
“We will not be complicit in this kind of attack on academic freedom on this extraordinary public institution,” Newsom said. “We are not like some of those other institutions.”
Campus Reform has reached out to Gov. Newsom and UCLA for comment. This article will be updated accordingly.