The stultification of America wears on as Trump and the systems that produced him continue to obstruct education. So far, Trump’s administration has frozen or terminated over 7,800 scientific research grants and fired over 25,000 scientists. The scientists oversaw projects Trump deemed distasteful: vaccine hesitancy, climate change, research on under-represented ethnic and gender groups, and more. As a result, research centers are seeing cutbacks and layoffs nationwide, and UC Berkeley is one of them.
No take-backsies
Under Trump in April 2026, the United States National Science Foundation walked back eighteen research grants awarded to UC Berkeley. The retraction did not just reek of bad-faith politics and unsportsmanlike conduct, it may have been illegal. According to the lawsuit, the USNSF violated a court injunction which forbade them from doing precisely that. Now, the university is suing the foundation on behalf of their unfairly terminated programs and researchers.
Campus viewed from the Berkeley Hills at sunrise, October 2014. Creative commons.
One grant, ordered restored, involves $14 million, awarded for an expansive cultural revival effort of the local Ohlone people. Among these projects will be a series of mixed reality exhibits about daily, pre-contact life of the Bay Area tribe. Their youngest descendants helped co-design it. This and any celebration of Indigenous sovereignty is fundamentally anti-Trump. Of course his flying monkeys went after it.
Filed last year, the suit contests Trump’s termination of research grants awarded to UC Berkeley. Research project manager Jedda Foreman told Berkeleyside about how the news reached her. A colleague disclosed an email from UC Berkeley Vice Chancellor of Research Katherine Yelick. It said that the NSF suspended the grant over allegations that the top-tier university was receiving foreign funding. Representing Foreman and other wronged researchers in another suit, Berkeley School of Law Professor Claudia Polsky saw plenty wrong. Most obvious besides an absence of foreign funding was that grantees received no information about why the funds disappeared. No one could tell them what was specifically problematic about how they used the money.
Tangled up in suits
UC spokesperson Dan Mogulof told Berkeleyside the university “is engaged with the government on matters pertaining to research grants, and remains committed to compliance with all federal laws, rules and regulations.” He declined to comment on who was affected, the amount of funds at stake, or potential impacts on campus infrastructure.
If it isn’t obvious by now the president wants dumb constituents, Trump has also cut funding for public broadcasting. That decision won’t simply deprive countless young children of a priceless educational resource. Cutting public broadcasting also means cutting off communication during storms, floods, a power outage, an earthquake, a fire, a landslide. In remote California and other parts of the United States as a whole, public broadcasting is the only means of warning. Donald Trump does not care whether you live or die, only that you vote for him on your way out.
Every penny of grant money Trump scrimps together will be spent cleaning up a disaster made worse because of him. Death tolls will climb even higher, and the cost of rebuilding afterwards could be too great. Although plenty of experiments require vacuum sealing, politically speaking, scientific research does not exist in a vacuum. Results have direct implications on our everyday existence. Hurricane and tornado warnings, air quality indices, the MyShake Alert program. Every scientific advancement that goes on to save lives undergoes exhaustive research first.
A sliver of hope does exist. The University of California system is redoubling its efforts to secure funds by alternative means. UC President James Milliken, Senator Scott Wiener, and United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain recently spoke at a rally in Sacramento. $23 billion for research is on the line. Official legislation to raise money will go before the State Assembly’s Appropriations Committee on May 14, 2026.
If successful, a bond measure will appear on November’s ballot and the issue will be put to vote. Funds are sorely needed in almost every federally funded program in the United States. Hanging in the balance: research in wildfire and pandemic preparedness, new medical treatments, and of course, improving scientific methodology overall. Business- and homeowners, kids and families, state and local governments, everyone benefits—everyone but Trump, which is precisely why he’s against it.
