UCLA recovered almost all of the 500 health and science grants the Trump administration suspended this summer, after a federal judge prohibited the government from withdrawing the money.

The restoration caps a remarkable turnaround for UCLA, which lost access to more than $500 million in research in July after the Trump administration froze science grants when it accused UCLA of tolerating anti-Semitism.

Those claims followed months of efforts at the university to implement the recommendations of a task force on antisemitism that campus administrators appointed to examine bias at the school.

Still, UCLA and the rest of the UC remained in the hot seat as the system contends with settlement demands from Trump that amount to $1.2 billion.

Trump sought that settlement over a litany of accusations, including that the campus tolerates antisemitism.

More than 600 Jewish faculty, students, staff and alumni of the University of California wrote in a public letter that stripping funding in response to those claims is, quote, misguided and punitive.

They went on to say, quote, cutting off hundreds of millions of dollars of research funds will do nothing to make UCLA safer for Jews, nor diminish antisemitism in the world.

The public letter says a coalition of UC faculty and staff have sued to halt Trump from pursuing his settlement demands.

The UC system has battled the Trump administration over various efforts to slash its funding since President Donald Trump's second term began.

The science grants pay for research into life saving drugs, dementia, heart disease in rural areas, robotics, education and a vast array of science inquiries across the country.

Science funding is also a key source of income and training for graduate students, or the next generation of publicly funded academics.

For CalMatters Im Mikhail Zinshteyn