The Brief

Following a  complicated Supreme Court ruling in late August, the fate of billions of dollars of science research grants is now at the mercy of an obscure federal law known as the Tucker Act.

“I had never spent more than three minutes in class even mentioning the existence of the Tucker Act, and it would never have occurred to me to do so before this spring,” said David Marcus, a UCLA professor of law who specializes in civil procedure and federal courts.

The Tucker Act created the modern version of the Court of Federal Claims, in existence since before the Civil War. Until recently it was the venue for contract disputes with the federal government — think: a company hired to build a bridge sues Uncle Sam over missed pay.

But starting with a surprise, terse order in April followed by a zigzagging set of decisions last month that are stumping lawyers, the Supreme Court basically declared that this little-known court is now the venue for any university or state that wants to dispute the Trump administration’s cancellation of research grants.

The Supreme Court’s April ruling stated that grant disputes should be hashed out in the Court of Federal Claims. The ruling came in a case in which California and other states sought to recover tens of millions of dollars in education funding.

Then came the high court’s fractured August ruling, which saw two slim majority rulings in the same case. One was a 5-4 decision siding with Trump that said grant funding has to be settled at the Court of Federal Claims rather than in a traditional district court. The decision could help the Trump administration because it likely requires plaintiffs to seek the restoration of their funding in the Court of Federal Claims and then challenge the legality of the policy behind the grant cancellations in a district court — in effect extra work for researchers and campuses seeking their funding back.

But the other 5-4 decision benefitted research universities by indicating that the new federal rules prompting the grant cuts were probably illegal, partially upholding a lower court judge’s order. The case will now proceed in the lower courts.

The ambiguity of the “tricky, complicated ruling,” as one legal scholar called it, prolongs the despair of thousands of researchers and graduate students whose life’s work — and a key source of staff income — either remains defunded or is now at risk of being once again terminated.

Many of the grants were terminated because they ran afoul of Trump’s January executive orders banning so-called diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.

“It’s completely foreign to me” that the Court of Federal Claims is “now the place to handle these sort of basic, fundamental questions about the government's power to handle appropriations,” Marcus said.

It’s not clear if existing grants that were cancelled and then reinstated, such as the hundreds at the National Institutes of Health, will again be defunded. The University of California is the recipient of hundreds of these health science grants. Nationally, the grants paid for research into life-saving drugs, dementia, heart disease in rural areas, robotics education and a whole gamut of science inquiries.

But even before the court’s August ruling, the UC was warning of major slowdowns to its research apparatus. The grant terminations and other funding cuts “have already disrupted the entire biotech research ecosystem at the University of California,” Theresa A. Maldonado, UC’s vice president for research and innovation, told a state legislative hearing in August. In 2024, California programs won more than $5 billion in grants from the NIH and over $1 billion from the National Science Foundation, she told lawmakers. More than 1,000 startups have been founded based on UC patents, she added.

CalMatters reached out to the University of California and California Department of Justice about how they interpret the Supreme Court’s split decision and the role of the Court of Federal Claims. California’s attorney general is part of a multistate suit at the center of the Supreme Court’s August ruling. Both agencies are studying the implications of the ruling, spokespersons for each agency said.

“Cuts to NIH funding risk derailing vital discoveries, disrupting research teams, and undermining economic growth in California and across the country,” UC spokesperson Stett Holbrook told CalMatters in an email. “We are closely assessing the ruling’s impact across UC’s campuses and health systems and will continue to press for full restoration of this essential federal support.”

How we got here

The Supreme Court’s split set of decisions was a response to a June lower court decision in Massachusetts. Judge William G. Young found that the federal government illegally terminated the grants, in large part because the grants weren’t reviewed individually but cancelled en masse. He also said the cancellations were racially motivated and ordered the funding restored. The August Supreme Court decision says that questions about restoring grant funding should go before the Court of Federal Claims.

“There is no reasoned decision-making at all” about the NIH’s grant terminations,” Young wrote in his opinion expanding on his June decision. Instead, the cancellations were driven by “sparse pseudo-reasoning, and wholly unsupported statements,” he wrote.

Young also faulted the Trump administration for having no definition for what constitutes DEI.

Earlier this month Young apologized to the Supreme Court for seemingly misinterpreting its April order in which the justices for the first time said federal grants must be heard in the Court of Federal Claims, the New York Times reported. Young indicated he was unclear on what the high court’s April and September orders meant for other district judges. “I simply did not understand that orders on the emergency docket were precedent,” he said.

Other jurists said the Supreme Court’s use of the so-called “shadow docket” to issue rulings with little guidance or explanation is confusing. Because of the shadow docket decisions, lower court judges “must grapple with both existing precedent and interim guidance from the Supreme Court that appears to set that precedent aside without much explanation or consensus,” wrote one judge in a September opinion.

The April decision commits one sentence to why the Court of Federal Claims is the right venue for government grant disputes. The five-judge majority in August in effect pointed to the April decision to support their ruling.

Neither the April nor the August Supreme Court rulings “seriously engages with the scope of the Tucker Act and the Court of Federal Claims jurisdiction,” Marcus said. “It's just astonishing.”

Ten of the 21 judges on the Court of Federal Claims were appointed by President Donald Trump, and a majority were appointed by Republican presidents, giving the Trump administration a likely advantage. However, the appeals court overseeing the Court of Federal Claims contains a majority of judges appointed by Democrats. The U.S. Supreme Court can review decisions by the appeals court.

At least $14 billion in grants affected by ruling

Parts of the Supreme Court decision “raise foundational questions” about grant termination lawsuits in federal district courts, Scott Delaney, a former environmental health research scientist at Harvard University, told CalMatters in an email.

"That means that it'll be much harder (and possibly impossible) to sue to reinstate all NIH and NSF grants that have been terminated, though scientists may still be able to win a court order forcing NIH or NSF to pay their universities the money that the government should have paid them under the grants," he wrote.

Delaney co-founded Grant Witness, a tool that scours federal datasets to tally which grants the federal government under Trump has terminated or suspended.

CalMatters asked him to count how many National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health grants that campuses across the country were fighting to reinstate are now affected by the Supreme Court ruling. The answer?

• NIH: 4,044 grants worth $5.7 billion in unspent funds ($12.6 billion in total award value)
• NSF: 1,954 grants worth $1 billion in unspent funds ($1.8 billion in estimated total award value)

Delaney said the Supreme Court ruling will likely affect billions of other dollars in grants from other agencies, such as NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency, but Grant Witness isn’t tracking all those yet.

Why Court of Federal Claims may be a challenge for universities 

Marcus said there are probably four reasons universities want to avoid the Court of Federal Claims in their lawsuits — and these are likely the same reasons why the Trump administration wants them there.

First, some district courts and appeals courts are more likely to include judges whose judicial leanings are more sympathetic to the states and research groups suing the Trump administration. That doesn’t mean just judges appointed by Democrats. Young, the district judge in the National Institutes of Health case, was appointed by Ronald Reagan.

Next, the Court of Federal Claims can award monetary damages, but it cannot make wider rulings, such as halting an agency from continued funding terminations. Those questions would have to go before a traditional district court, so it adds more work for plaintiffs suing the federal government.

Third, the Court of Federal Claims is more limiting in how it allows researchers to join a class action suit. Basically, researchers whose grants were affected by the terminations would have to opt-in by filing paperwork to receive potential financial relief or have their grants restored, Marcus said. That’s different from what occurs in traditional federal courts, where a judge can approve a set of criteria for who is eligible for a class, and then all those eligible people benefit from any decision that awards the class relief.

But if a university sues, Marcus thinks the process is somewhat easier: The school would just file a complaint with a long list of all the grants or researchers covered in their suit.

Fourth, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her dissenting opinion for the Supreme Court noted other possible hardships. Requiring plaintiffs to argue before district courts that the rules terminating their grants are illegal and then separately getting their terminated grants reinstated is “sending plaintiffs on a likely futile, multivenue quest for complete relief,” Jackson wrote.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett disagreed in her majority 5-4 opinion. “Vacating the guidance does not reinstate terminated grants,” she wrote, adding that “two-track litigation” in different courts is common. She also addressed Jackson’s criticisms head-on, writing that both district courts and the Court of Federal Claims can separately adjudicate the relief universities or researchers seek.

Barrett and Jackson were on the same side in the other 5-4 decision that said Trump’s policies to cut the grants were likely illegal.

What’s next?

Marcus cautions that the legal terrain around restoring grants remains an open question.

But based on his reading of the Supreme Court cases, it is quite possible that the Court of Federal Claims is where scientists will have to try to force the restoration of any terminated funding. And the district court will continue to determine whether the policy behind the grant cuts is legal. It creates a scenario in which the Court of Federal Claims can order funding restored, but until a district court rules on the policy justifying the grant cuts, the federal government can continue to cancel other grants or deny new ones.

But Marcus also cites at least one federal judge in California who thinks that individual researchers cannot sue in the Court of Federal Claims because they’re third parties to the contracts; the government technically sent the contracts to the university, not to the researchers. Under that scenario, it may be that individual researchers cannot sue to restore their grants at all and would instead need to rely on their employer to take up the legal fight.

The equation for universities suing is also nuanced, Marcus said. If a university such as the UC sues to restore funding, there’s a possibility that a district court may rule that funding restoration would have to be heard in the Court of Federal Claims. However, he noted that a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the Trump administration to restore the $2.2 billion in grants it froze at Harvard University. That judge argued in part that the cuts violated the First Amendment rights of the university. So even though the case is about money — presumably the domain of the Court of Federal Claims — issues of protected speech belong in a traditional district court.

“The resolution of these claims might result in money changing hands, but what is fundamentally at issue is a bedrock constitutional principle rather than the interpretation of contract terms,” the judge, Allison D. Burroughs, wrote.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A new trail across the beloved natural area of Elephant Hill in Northeast Los Angeles is officially opening this weekend.

The route is years in the making, and it's a big milestone in the decades-long conservation efforts to preserve this local jewel in the community of El Sereno.

The hiking trail connects one side of Elephant Hill to the other — from the corner of Pullman Street and Harriman Avenue all the way across to Lathrop Street.

It's 0.75 miles in total, but packs a punch.

"It's a pretty straight shot, but because of the terrain — the trail is kind of twisty and curvy. There's switchbacks — and great views," Elva Yañez, board president of the nonprofit Save Elephant Hill, said.

People have always been able to access the 110-acre green space, but Yañez said the new trail provides a safe and easy way to navigate the steep hillsides.

The El Sereno nonprofit has been working for two decades to preserve the land. Illegal dumping and off-roading have damaged the open space over the years. And the majority of the 110 acres are privately owned by an estimated 200 individual owners.

Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (MRCA) joined the efforts in 2018, spurred by a $700,000 grant from Los Angeles County Regional Park and Open Space District, in part, to build the trail. The local agency received some $2 million in grants from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to add to the 10 acres of Elephant Hill it manages and conserves. This year, MCRA acquired an additional 12 parcels — or about 2.4 acres.

And the spiffy new footpath — with trail signage, information kiosks and landscape boulders — is not just a long-sought-for victory but a beginning in a sense.

"We know that it means a lot to the community," Sarah Kevorkian, who oversees the trail project for MRCA, said. "We're wrapping up the trail, but it really feels like the beginning of all that is to come."

A hint of that vision already exists — for hikers traversing the new route, courtesy of Test Plot, the L.A.-based nonprofit that works to revitalize depleted lands.

"They're able to see at the end of the trail, at the 'test plot' — exactly what a restored Elephant Hill would look like," Yañez said.

Here's a preview:

The Venice Boardwalk after sunset has generally been a no-go zone for tourists and locals alike, as the beachside bars and restaurants close on the early side and safety is often an issue. Now, a group of artists is out to bring some vibrancy to the creative neighborhood with a series of new installations that will include live evening performances – and even a “Venice Opera House.”

“Let's play with light and let's play with sound and give people a reason to come to the Boardwalk after sundown,” said artist and entrepreneur Stefan Ashkenazy, who is curating the project and owns the buildings housing them. “I mean, let's just be open 24 hours a day.”

The concept doesn’t have an official name yet, but he’s been calling it “See World.”

Artist James Ostrer's space looks out from a bed through the fence to the ocean at Venice Beach.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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William Attaway, a longtime Venice artist, created a gallery space filled with various paintings and sculptures.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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The pair of modern buildings on the Venice Boardwalk at Thornton Ave. – with their big balconies, floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and seven open garage-style retail spaces – have sat mostly empty since Snapchat vacated their beachside offices in 2019. Ashkenazy recently bought the building and recruited artists to fill those front-facing spaces with creative work until a full-time tenant comes in.

Over the past several weeks the installations have been created in real-time, in public.

All of the projects are loosely along the theme of “home,” with each artist claiming a “room” in the two buildings that stretch across a full block on the Boardwalk. Several local Venice artists are featured, including William Attaway, whose intricate mosaic work is recognizable on the Venice public restrooms along the beach. Attaway’s space features a floating larger-than-life-sized statue and various works in a mini-gallery. In the next room is Robin Murez’s pieces, featuring carved wooden seats from her beloved neighborhood Venice Flying Carousel.

Ashkenazy is no stranger to wild (and wildly successful) art ideas. He’s the owner of the Petit Ermitage hotel in West Hollywood, a longtime haven for visiting artists, and the founder of the decade-old Bombay Beach Biennale, where artists install all kinds of work in an annual event near the Salton Sea. Many of the artists from that community are featured at the Venice project.

A "Venice Opera House" will host pop-up music events throughout the summer.

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny's paintings on the wall of his Venice space.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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New York-based artist Greg Haberny and London-based artist James Ostrer have brought some of their work in the Bombay Beach Biennale to the Venice project. Their windows on the Boardwalk both speak to a child-like sense of wonder and creativity.

“I think it's just kind of exploring and playing a little bit, to have the freedom to be able to do that,” Haberny says of his imagined child’s bedroom space, which includes a fort made out of puffy cheese balls. “It's a big space, too.
It's beautiful.”

Ostrer is experimenting with a performance art idea where he sits in bed amongst a room full of his own artwork, which he describes as “happy art with an edge.” Looking out at the ocean from the bed, he’s invited passersby to sit and have chats with him about his work or anything else they want to talk about.

“It’s a very intimate space, so you have a different kind of conversation,” he said. “I use art to channel human creativity, and [talk about] dark things.”

While there are open fences that block off the spaces, they aren’t sealed up at night. Both Ashkenazy and the team of artists seemed open to the idea that anything could happen and that the installations are a conversation with the public – and with that comes some risk.

Greg Haberny (right) works with his assistants on an installation featuring kid-inspired graffiti art and a "cheesy puff" fort.

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Laura Hertzfeld

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“I don't really know if I [would] say worried, but I guess it's just the cost of doing business,” Haberny said. “I don't really make things to get damaged or broken, sure. But I have done [things like] burned all my paintings and then made paint out of ash.”

While he’s felt safe – and even slept overnight in the installation – Ostrer has been collaborating with a local female artist who performs in a pig mask in front of his installation some nights. Watching her perform, he said, has taught him about the vulnerability of women in public spaces like the Boardwalk. “I've started to, on a very fractional level, have seen how scary that is. Because I've sat in the bed behind her performing at the front here… the way in which men are approaching her and shrieking at her … it's shocking.”

Ashkenazy says he will keep the artists in the space, potentially rotating new ones in, until a fulltime tenant takes over.

“This is an experiment … and after acquiring the building, the intention wasn't, ‘let's open a bunch of public art spaces,’ he said. “It is kind of …what the building wanted and listening to what the Boardwalk needed. Let's play, let's have the artists that we love and appreciate have a space to play and engage and give the locals and the visitors to the Boardwalk something to experience.”

A coalition of residents from across the San Gabriel Valley are mobilizing over a battery storage project and possibly more industrial development in the City of Industry they say could pollute communities next door.

A protest is scheduled today in neighboring Rowland Heights, targeting a 400-megawatt battery energy storage facility sited on about 9 acres that was approved by the City of Industry leaders in January.

Such Battery Energy Storage Systems, or BESS, are used to keep the power grid stable, especially as output from renewable energy sources like solar and wind fluctuate. But fires involving lithium batteries at some sites have heightened environmental and public health fears.

Because of the City of Industry’s unusual, sprawling shape stretching along the 60 Freeway, it borders on more than a dozen communities, meaning what happens there can have far-reaching impact.

“Pollution does not end right at the border,” said Andrew Yip, an organizer with No Data Centers SGV Coalition. “Pollution travels.”

Some local activists with the Puente Hills Community Preservation Association have challenged the approval of the battery facility under the California Environmental Quality Act.

Beyond environmental concerns, locals have also been frustrated with how decisions are made by officials in the City of Industry, a municipality that’s almost entirely zoned for industrial use and has less than 300 residents.

Organizers say they’ve struggled to get direct responses from city officials whom they say have replaced regular meetings with special meetings, which under state law require less advance notice.

A city spokesperson has not responded to requests for comment.

The so-called Marici Energy Storage System Facility would be run by Aypa Power. The fact that the battery storage developer is owned by the private equity giant Blackstone, a major investor in AI and data centers, has only fueled concerns that a battery storage facility would lay the groundwork for data center development.

A request for comment from Aypa was not returned.

Today’s protest is taking place at Peter F. Schabarum Regional Park in Rowland Heights across the street from the Puente Hills Mall, a largely vacant “dead” mall, which activists fear could be redeveloped into a data center and bring higher utility costs and greater air and noise pollution.

Yip pointed out that industrial developments make a lot of money for the City of Industry.

“But none of these surrounding communities receive any of those benefits,” Yip said. “Yet we have to put up with all the harmful effects and impacts from this city that does all this development without really reaching out.”

It’s about the size of a park bench and made of steel and wood. The bench’s arm rests are formed by the letters “L” and “A” in a design that’s unmistakable to any sports fan. But the welder-artist who created it says it’s not a Dodgers bench.

“This is about civic pride, L.A. pride. I made a design statement saying that it has nothing affiliated with the Dodgers,” said Steve Campos.

Campos grew up near Dodger Stadium, raised by parents who were die-hard Dodgers fans. So much, that they named him after Steve Garvey but that legacy doesn’t keep him from confronting how the Dodgers benefitted from the mass displacement of working-class people from Chavez Ravine after World War Two. That’s why he calls it an L.A. Bench, and not a Dodgers Bench.

The logo may be synonymous with the city's beloved baseball team, but the design of the interlocking letters was used by the L.A. Angels minor league baseball team before the Dodgers moved to L.A. in 1958.

“The monogram was here before the Dodgers,” Campos said.

A second-generation welder

Welding is the Campos family business. His father created gates and security bars for windows and doors for L.A. clients. That was the foundation for the work Campos has done for two decades since graduating from Lincoln High School, L.A. Trade Tech College, and enrolling in a summer program at Art Center in Pasadena.

The inspiration for the L.A. Bench came last year while he was playing around in his shop creating versions of the L.A. logo. A friend he hangs with at Echo Park Lake asked Campos to make him a piece of furniture.

“I was trying to figure out what my friend Curly wanted. He liked Dodgers and drinking and getting into fights, so I was like, 'Let me make something with the LA monogram,'” he said.

Welder-artist Steve Campos created whimsical steel sculptures with the LA logo.

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It didn’t design itself. He said he had to lengthen the legs on the “A” and lean the back of the “L” in order to make the bench functional. In the process, he’s made a piece of furniture with a ubiquitous logo that he’s embedded with his own L.A. pride, as well as city history past and present.

LA civic pride travels to Japan

Campos vacationed in Japan the last week of April and took advantage of the trip to reach out to people who may be interested in the L.A. Bench. He was caught off guard by people’s reaction when he showed them pictures of it.

“They look at it and they go, 'Oh, Ohtani bench,'” he said.

For them, it’s still a bench embedded with pride, he said, but centered around Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani, an icon in his native Japan.

Campos has made four L.A. benches and is selling them fully assembled, he said, for $2,500 each — taking into account his labor and how costly the raw materials have become. For now, he’s offering the metal parts as a package for $500, which requires the buyer to purchase the wood for the seat and the back — an easy process, he said.

While he has no plans to mass produce the L.A. Bench, he does have one goal in mind that shows how hard it is for him to separate L.A. civic pride and the Dodgers.

“I would love to get a couple of them installed at Dodger Stadium,” he said.