In spring 2025, when the Department of Government Efficiency was fully operational, researchers across the UCs received letters announcing that their funding had been abruptly terminated.
Dr. Neeta Thakur was one of those. A UC San Francisco pulmonologist whose EPA grant supported research on the health effects of wildfire smoke, she was given no rationale except that her study was “inconsistent with, and no longer effectuates, Agency priorities.”
To Berkeley Law Professor Claudia Polsky, J.D. ’96, these terminations were plainly illegal, and she was certain the University would fight back. When it didn’t, she did, building a class-action suit with six named plaintiffs—five from Berkeley, one from UCSF—who represented all similarly affected researchers in the ten-campus system.
To help argue the case, she enlisted top litigators including Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, one of the country’s most respected constitutional scholars, and Elizabeth Cabraser ’75, J.D. ’78, a leading class-action attorney. Two firms, including several Berkeley Law alumni, worked pro bono on the case.
On June 23, 2025, in the case of Thakur v. Trump, a federal district judge issued a preliminary injunction against the Trump administration, ordering that terminations by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, and the Environmental Protection Agency cease, and that hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding be restored. As the case expanded to encompass additional agencies, the total figure being litigated has grown to well over a billion dollars.
Cabraser said it would not have happened without Polsky, whom she calls a “force of nature.”
“Someone had to go first.… [Claudia] was able to find people that were willing to step forward when the institutions themselves could not or would not.”
While Polsky stressed that the case is ongoing and that permanent relief is not assured, she takes pride in the number of researchers who have been able to continue their work. She also laments those who haven’t.
“I get really heartbroken when there are things that we can’t fit into our suit, or when I talk with people from other institutions who can’t find lawyers. But we’re doing what we can.”
Professor Polsky spoke with California on April 10. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You filed the case a year ago in June. What precipitated it?
Shortly after the inauguration, it became clear that academic freedom was going to be under assault. In February, I was working with campus colleagues to rally on Sproul Plaza to express concern over intrusions into classroom speech and mobilization against immigrants, and all of these other imminent threats. Shortly thereafter, I became aware that termination of research funding was another weapon in the arsenal to shut down independent thought and expression. And it became evident pretty quickly that this wasn’t one or two shots across the bow; it was a wholesale assault on basic research.
How did you respond?
I thought, Well, this is so fundamental, and goes right to the pocketbook and core mission of the University, surely UCOP is going to run in and University counsel is going to take on these illegal terminations. I mean, the legal infirmities were so obvious that any second-year law student could say these cuts are readily challengeable. They didn’t. And then all of these researchers started to wonder, Where is the University? And they started to ask lots of questions, and all they were told is, “We’re taking this very seriously.” They would go to town halls with administrators, all the way up to then-President Drake, and all they would get were additional adjectives and adverbs. “We’re taking this very, very seriously. We’re meeting a lot.”
So when did you take it upon yourself to act?
The weeks were going by, and I thought, I’m going to start collecting the stories of these affected researchers and compile their documents, and then I can go to UC counsel and say, “Look, these are the claims that are viable. Here’s a whole bunch of evidence. It’s time to go get a temporary restraining order and shut this craziness down.”
And so I began calling researchers and getting information about the substance of grants and termination letters, and looking at how ridiculous they were. I started being very outspoken and saying to administrators, “Well, look, here’s all this data—this is now a packaged, readily litigable case. Who wants to go do this?” And I just got totally blown off. I ultimately went to a regents meeting in Mission Bay, at a point when I had enough information to file the case and had already lined up potential co-counsel, and said, “You know, if you want in on this, this is a good moment for the UC to get involved, and I would be happy to talk to any regent, any UCOP counsel about this. Here’s my number.” All that happened was I got a call from an LA Times reporter who was there, and I got one call from UCOP asking if we would share our complaint before it was filed.
It was like, the extent of our engagement is to make sure that our press office has something to say when they get a phone call.
The legal infirmities were so obvious that any second-year law student could say these cuts are readily challengeable.
But you forged ahead?
It was clear to me that a class action was a viable mechanism for challenging these terminations. That was the way the researchers could self-organize. We could have a handful of people who were willing to be public and to spend the time it took to document their own situations, to write declarations about the impact on their research and careers and mentees and public knowledge.
After about six weeks of me working up the case on my own, I contacted a really terrific class action law firm, one of whose named partners, Elizabeth Cabraser, has been extremely engaged with the law school. I said, “You know how to do class actions better than anyone. I don’t know how to bring class actions. I’m a litigator, but this is not the kind of litigation I do. I am, however, now intimately familiar with the circumstances of termination of all these grants, and I know administrative law, and this is clearly illegal. And there also seem to be constitutional violations. And, for whatever reasons, the University is not stepping up on its own and is not interested in being partners.”
Even though we’re talking about hundreds of millions of dollars in funding at stake?
Actually, billions. The University gets about $4 billion a year in federal funding. They’ve never given us a figure of their total loss, but I’m going to estimate just based on what we’ve restored and what we’re currently working to restore that it’s over $2 billion.
Okay, so the advantage of the class action is that it applies to all UC researchers?
Exactly. It applies to everybody. It’s essentially opt out rather than opt in. It offers really broad relief.
We initially sued over EPA and NSF and NEH terminations because we had specific plaintiffs who were willing to come forward for those grants. And so when we got a court order that those had been terminated illegally, every single grant that those three agencies had terminated to a UC researcher was reversed.
The suit has since expanded to encompass NIH, Department of Defense, and Department of Transportation. And now we’re in really high-stakes litigation about termination of Department of Energy grants, which are more recent and astonishingly valuable.
And so we proceeded. And, you know, there were so many opportunities, even after we had initial victories, where the University could have said, “Let’s provide really comprehensive data on the grants we have so that when these grant reinstatements are scheduled to happen, we can make sure that they really land properly and error-free.” We had none of that. So I’ve been doing a shoe-leather tour of UC campuses and talking to researchers and trying to figure out if things were reinstated properly.
There are actually people who are paid to defend the University’s interests, right? So, it’s sort of ridiculous that this is an extracurricular project, but here we are.
I was tremendously lucky that the law school’s leadership in this moment of crisis is what it is.
You got help from outside firms. These were pro bono?
Pro bono. Lieff Cabraser was willing to supply a number of lawyers who really knew how to structure a class action, and they brought in another law firm, Farella Braun + Martel, that also contributed tons of free hours. And I was tremendously lucky that the law school’s leadership in this moment of crisis is what it is, and that there was someone in charge who was not only this eminent constitutional law scholar, but really a scholar-activist who saw this as a very significant threat. So I asked Dean Chemerinsky if he would be willing to argue the very first motion in the case, both to establish some credibility and to take advantage of the fact that he would have no learning curve as to the case law.
He was writing op-eds at the time arguing that universities shouldn’t capitulate to Trump and should instead present a united front against the administration’s bullying.
He was a big proponent of having universities band together in their mutual defense, and that just didn’t happen.
Why do you think that is?
I think there’s this path dependence. If the big, powerful institutions with huge endowments seem to be caving, then everyone else thinks, Well, surely we have to cave.
My goal was for UC to be the first to fight back before getting presented with Trump’s demands. UC didn’t end up doing that for itself, but we did go to court before there was any demand letter saying you have to do XYZ with respect to antisemitism or same-sex bathrooms or whatever cockamamie thing that had nothing to do with the research agenda. So I feel good about that.
Then, when Trump finally showed up with these ridiculous demands to UCLA, we were able to turn it around pretty quickly and say, “Actually, that violates the court order. You can’t just turn off these grants.” So that’s been gratifying.
And then there was a later argument that arose related to the Department of Energy and the mass termination of grants in October during the budget showdown. That made a lot of news because it targeted blue states and was so overtly partisan and vindictive and had nothing to do with the operation of the University. Now it wasn’t even about antisemitism. It was just about what candidate your state voted for. We’re continuing to litigate it, but that’s basically the only agency where we don’t currently have money back in UC researchers’ pockets.
So, where do things stand today?
In terms of practical effect, my back-of-the-napkin math is that we’ve restored about a thousand grants and a billion dollars to the UC system. And the major DOE grant we are trying to get reinstated is a single grant worth over a billion dollars. So that’s a very, very high stakes play.
But this isn’t final relief. The federal government is still hoping to re-terminate a subset of these grants. Preliminary injunctions can stay in place for months, and they have, but it’s not the end of the road. There’s a lot more work ahead. And then there will be appeals. And in the meantime, this is just one of more than 100 similar cases against the Trump administration.
This isn’t final relief. The federal government is still hoping to re-terminate a subset of these grants. There’s a lot more work ahead.
Okay, shifting focus to the larger political context, you’ve spoken about “fast fascism,” a term I’m not aware of.
One thing that struck me was how everybody I knew who was born in Europe said, “This is what fascism looks like.” But we have this myth of American exceptionalism, and we can’t go there. If you used words like “autocracy” or “fascism,” it was seen as hyperbolic. You’re the lunatic fringe, right?
And then the facts move the center, and all of a sudden people are saying, “Oh, my gosh, now we’re putting people in remote prisons, in countries that are neither ours nor their country of origin, with no due process? … We won’t bring someone back when we’re under judge’s orders to bring them back? … Wow, this does look a lot like fascism!”
There was just this incrementalist orientation, this failure to realize that we have entered a qualitatively different era, and you need to be a lot gutsier and a lot more vocal. You need to be the Danes looking out for the Jews. You need to have Anne Frank’s family in your attic. That’s where we are. So, when you ask, “Why did the institution not do anything?” I think there was just this complete unwillingness to acknowledge that we need new rules, that this is not a time when you strike a committee.
A lot of people complain of outrage fatigue or emotional exhaustion.
I get that. And I feel really grateful to this litigation for focusing me. I wake up and spend 10 minutes looking at the newspaper, and then I just get to my task list, right? Someone else can worry about immigration, and someone else can worry about the food banks running out of food, and someone else can worry about the fact that you can’t get an abortion in a lot of states. It’s horrible. But it’s clear to me that the best allocation of my personal time is to focus on our case. And I understand absolutely at the individual level why it’s so hard for people to mobilize. But at the institutional level, when your core brand is being attacked, to have no plan? I think that’s unforgivable.
Given your disappointment, what keeps you going?
The joy of it. And my belief in the researchers and the faculty we have and the importance of the things that they do. I mean, I’ve just spent so much time with individual researchers who are doing things that have staggering levels of potential social benefit.
And in cases where the focus is more esoteric, I just admire the purity of the quest. I like that, if someone wants to do something deep about Edgar Allan Poe, there’s still space in this universe to do that. But an overwhelming amount of the research that happens has such tremendous societal payoff, and the people who are doing it are so damn good. And you know, just my sense of moral outrage is very sustaining.
So I don’t wake up every day and say, “Why isn’t UCOP doing this work?” We’re done with that, and now we’re just going to try to save the stuff that’s worth saving. It’s this kind of Catcher in the Rye thing of just saving everything you can from hurtling off the cliff.
You know you can’t save it all. And I get really heartbroken when there are things that we can’t fit into our suit, or when I talk with people from other institutions who can’t find lawyers. But we’re doing what we can. And, you know, there have been some really nice communications from people both inside and outside our institution saying, “We get that this isn’t guaranteed, but it means a lot that somebody is willing to fight for us.”
Given Professor Polsky’s criticisms, the magazine reached out to the UC Office of the President for response. UCOP provided a statement citing its advocacy efforts in Washington and Sacramento, cosponsorship of a proposed $12 billion state research bond (SB 895), successful legal challenges to other federal cuts, and expanded public outreach. “The University is using every available tool to protect its mission.” The response did not mention Thakur v. Trump by name or address Polsky’s specific criticism that the University did not support her litigation. For UCOP’s complete statement, click here.
