The University of California has imposed a system-wide hiring freeze and made additional cuts, its president said on Wednesday, as part of efforts to mitigate the expected impact of sharp cuts in federal funding under the Trump administration.
In a letter to staff and students, the school’s president, Michael Drake, said he had also directed all UC locations to implement cost-saving measures, such as delaying maintenance and reducing business travel, to help conserve funds.
As the Trump administration is attempting to use federal funding cuts to advance several different political agendas, big public university systems, including those in California, face challenges on multiple fronts, from slashed medical research funding to Trump’s social media threat to cut money from colleges that allow what he called “illegal protests”.
Drake wrote that the university’s legal team “prepared for this moment and has been working diligently to protect the University and our mission through the courts”, as well as by working collaboratively with elected officials, but that these efforts would probably not be enough to prevent the “significant financial challenges ahead”.
The University of California operates one of the largest higher-education systems in the country, with 10 main campuses, six academic research centers and three national laboratories. The 10 campuses have a total of nearly 300,000 students enrolled, more than 25,000 faculty members and 173,000 staff members.
Some of the proposed policy changes and executive orders issued by Donald Trump since he returned to office in January “threaten funding for lifesaving research, patient care and education support”, Drake wrote.
In addition, the 2025-26 California state budget calls for a substantial cut to the university’s budget, Drake said.
“These actions affect colleges and universities across the country,” Drake said. “As one of the most innovative, research-focused public institutions in the nation, these proposed changes would have a particularly profound impact on the University of California.”
The university is already fighting alongside Democratic state attorneys general, who have sued over the Trump administration’s proposed sweeping cuts to medical research funded through the National Institutes of Health.
The University of California hiring freezes are likely to have big ripple effects, the Los Angeles Times reported, noting that there are thousands of current openings across the University of California’s many campuses, including “more than 1,000 heath-related positions in nursing, medical research and clinical, and nonclinical roles” in Los Angeles alone.
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In early March, Sarah Spreitzer, the vice-president and chief of staff of government relations at the American Council for Education, warned that Trump’s education cuts are “going to have long-term impacts on the American public and post-secondary education that I don’t think we can really even start to understand”.
The University of California system is the latest to announce a hiring freeze as the Trump administration threatens cuts to federal contracts and research grants.
Harvard and Stanford are among the other schools to have also temporarily paused hiring. Johns Hopkins University announced last week that it would cut more than 2,000 jobs after the Trump administration terminated $800m in grants at the institution.
The funding cuts come as universities also anticipate a return of a travel ban that will affect international students and staff, and a new high-profile threat: the sudden deportations of students and staff members.
