UC Researcher Plaintiffs File for Class Certification and Summary Judgment; Announce EPA Settlement in Principle in Thakur v. Trump Case

Lawyers representing University of California researchers in the Thakur v. Trump class action asked a federal court on July 15 to rule that government agencies violated the Constitution when they terminated the researchers’ grants. In a combined motion for summary judgment and class certification filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, the plaintiffs argue that the terminations violated the First Amendment, the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee, and the separation of powers. The Thakur team separately filed a joint status report announcing that the plaintiffs have reached a settlement in principle with the Environmental Protection Agency to resolve their claims against that agency on a class-wide basis.

Central to the plaintiffs’ motion is a series of factual stipulations the agencies agreed to in lieu of discovery. In those stipulations, the agencies admitted the following:

• The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Transportation (DOT), and the National Institutes of Health-Health and Human Services (NIH-HHS) admitted that they selected grants for termination because the grants “expressed, or were presumed to express, viewpoints disfavored by the Administration”—the basis for the plaintiffs’ First Amendment claim.
• The Department of Energy (DOE) admitted that in October 2025 it terminated 283 grants in states that voted for Kamala Harris while declining to terminate 340 grants in states that voted for Donald Trump, “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state”—the basis for the plaintiffs’ equal protection claim.
• DOD, DOT, NEH, NIH-HHS, and NSF admitted that they terminated grants funded with money that Congress had “appropriated for the purpose of grant-making,” without reallocating those funds to other grant-making programs—the basis for the plaintiffs’ separation of powers claim.

The Plaintiffs’ Notice of Motion and Combined Motion for Summary Judgment and Class Certification is available here. The pro bono case, Thakur v. Trump, was filed in June 2025 on behalf of UC faculty and other researchers whose grants were abruptly terminated by the Trump Administration via Executive Order.

The plaintiff class is represented by Tony Schoenberg, Linda Gilleran, Kyle McLorg, Dylan Silva, and Katherine Balkoski with Farella Braun + Martel LLP; Elizabeth Cabraser, Richard Heimann, Kevin Budner, Annie Wanless, and Clare Perez with Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein LLP; and Erwin Chemerinsky and Claudia Polsky.

Farella Braun + Martel is a leading Northern California law firm representing corporate and private clients in sophisticated business and real estate transactions and complex commercial, civil, and criminal litigation. Clients seek our imaginative legal solutions and the dynamism and intellectual creativity of our lawyers. We are headquartered in San Francisco and maintain an office in the Napa Valley focused on the wine industry.

Contact: 
Cheryl Loof
Farella Braun + Martel LLP
415.954.4433 / [email protected]