The Trump administration is demanding more than $1 billion from the University of California, Los Angeles, as part of an effort to reinstate hundreds of millions in previously suspended federal research funding, according to media reports.
Under the proposal, obtained by The New York Times on Friday, UCLA would pay $1 billion to the U.S. government and contribute $172 million to a claims fund to compensate victims of civil rights violations.
If accepted, it would mark the largest payout by any university to reach a deal with the White House. By comparison, Columbia University agreed to pay $221 million in its settlement, while Brown University committed $50 million to state workforce programs.
University of California President James B. Milliken said in a Friday statement that the document, sent by the Department of Justice, was “just received” by the school and they were in the process of actively reviewing it.
He continued: “As a public university, we are stewards of taxpayer resources, and a payment of this scale would completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system as well as inflict great harm on our students and all Californians.”
In recent months, the Trump administration has focused heavily on elite private universities, framing its actions as part of a broader campaign to combat antisemitism and reform institutions it perceives as bastions of liberal ideology.
Its attention on UCLA, however, has escalated quickly. On July 29 — the same day that University of California settled a lawsuit alleging the school allowed pro-Palestinian protesters to block Jewish students on campus — the Justice Department announced it believed UCLA had committed civil rights violations.
Later that week, school chancellor Julio Frenk confirmed the federal government had begun freezing the university’s research funding.
“The suspension of these funds is not only a loss to the researchers who rely on critical grants,” Frenk said in a statement, “it is a loss for Americans across the nation whose work, health and future depend on our groundbreaking research and scholarship.”
He added: “We are doing everything we can to protect the interests of faculty, students and staff — and to defend our values and principles. The UC Board of Regents and the UC Office of the President are providing counsel as we actively evaluate our best course of action.”
President Milliken also addressed the cuts to funding, noting they “do nothing to address antisemitism.” He also said that the “extensive work that UCLA and the entire University of California have taken to combat antisemitism has apparently been ignored. The announced cuts would be a death knell for innovative work that saves lives, grows our economy and fortifies our national security. It is in our country’s best interest that funding be restored.”
Columbia was the first university to settle with the Trump administration over antisemitism claims back in July. Harvard University has sued the administration over their funding cuts and negotiated for a restoration of their federal backing. The two Ivy League schools were among 10 universities Trump’s Federal Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism flagged as campuses with increased antisemitic incidents since Oct. 7, 2023.
Columbia; Harvard; George Washington University; Johns Hopkins University; New York University; Northwestern University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Minnesota and the University of Southern California are currently under investigation by the task force, along with UCLA. Other Ivy League schools that have since been targeted include Brown, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton.
