The Department of Health and Human Services opened an investigation into UCLA medical school on Thursday after whistleblowers alleged that the school’s admissions office discriminates based on race, marking an escalation of a scandal that enveloped the medical school last year and raised questions about whether the doctors it was graduating were up to snuff.
HHS’s Office of Civil Rights will investigate whether the school’s admissions office, led by anesthesiologist Jennifer Lucero, holds black and Hispanic applicants to a lower academic standard than white and Asian applicants, according to a source familiar with the investigation. California law has banned racial preferences in university admissions for nearly three decades, and the Supreme Court followed suit in 2023.
The probe is the direct result of a Washington Free Beacon report last year that included testimony from admissions officers and showed that students were failing basic exams in record droves.
Whistleblowers alleged that students’ performance on those tests, known as shelf exams, reflected the declining quality of admitted students on Lucero’s watch. According to four people who served with her on the admissions committee, Lucero has frequently pushed through unqualified minority candidates to diversify the school. Other doctors alleged that Lucero attempted to axe qualified white applicants to the residency program in anesthesiology, where she serves as the vice chair for inclusive excellence.
Corroborated by written correspondence between UCLA officials, the whistleblowers painted a disturbing picture of lawlessness at one of the top medical schools in California, which banned affirmative action in 1996, long before the Supreme Court outlawed the practice in college admissions nationwide. The doctors only spoke to the press after trying to raise concerns internally, but UCLA refused to provide them with a written guarantee of non-retaliation, effectively squashing an internal probe, they said.
HHS did not name UCLA in a press release issued Thursday afternoon, but said that the agency would investigate whether an "HHS-funded medical school gives unlawful preference to applicants based on their race, color, or national origin." It is the fifth probe launched by the department pursuant to the president’s executive orders on DEI, which instruct federal agencies to identify up to nine targets for civil rights investigations.
"HHS will not tolerate informal admissions practices and institutional policies that promote racial discrimination at HHS-funded institutions," the agency told the Free Beacon. "This investigation reflects the Administration’s commitment to honor the hard work, excellence, and individual achievement of all students and not just those of particular racial backgrounds."
As a medical center that receives federal funds, UCLA is subject to multiple laws banning racial discrimination. If HHS determines that the school violated those laws, it could lose millions in federal grants—a penalty that the Trump administration has imposed on Columbia University, pending corrective action, over its failure to combat anti-Semitism. Many of the canceled grants involved medical research.
UCLA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The probe is the latest black eye for UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, which spent much of 2024 fending off scandals related to DEI and anti-Semitism.
During a mandatory class on "structural racism," for example, a guest lecturer led students in chants of "Free, Free Palestine" and demanded that they kneel down to worship "mama earth." Readings for the class informed students that "fatphobia is medicine’s status quo" and described weight loss as a "hopeless endeavor"—propositions that shocked doctors who reviewed the syllabus, including former Harvard Medical School dean Jeffrey Flier, and led to an audit of the entire first-year curriculum.
But those scandals paled in comparison with the stunning stories about the school’s admissions office. In some of the cohorts Lucero admitted, more than 50 percent of students failed exams in emergency medicine, internal medicine, and pediatrics, per leaked data obtained by the Free Beacon. Nearly a fourth of students in the class of 2025 failed three or more shelf exams, which merely require test-takers to score above the bottom 5th percentile to pass.
Professors also began to notice that students could not answer basic questions during their clinical rotations—and would at times berate doctors who put them on the spot.
"I don't know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors," one professor told the Free Beacon at the time. "Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students."
Alarmed by what they were seeing—and convinced that it had something to do with the changing demographics of the medical school, where the number of Asian matriculants fell by 30 percent in just three years—eight professors at the medical school decided to speak out. Many described a pattern of racially charged comments from Lucero, who they said would lash out at colleagues for expressing concerns about the academic credentials of minority candidates.
The result, according to current and former admissions officials, was a two-tiered system in which blacks and Hispanics—but not whites and Asians—could be admitted with low scores.
The bar for underrepresented minorities is "as low as you could possibly imagine," one committee member told the Free Beacon. "It completely disregards grades and achievements."
Admissions officers used proxies like zip codes to identify a student’s race even if it wasn’t included in their application, whistleblowers said. On a separate admissions committee for anesthesiology residents, Lucero even resisted calls to shield the race of applicants, telling colleagues in an email that "we are not required to blind any information," despite California’s ban on racial preferences.
In fact, most legal experts agree that soliciting such information can be evidence of discrimination. Adam Mortara, the lead trial lawyer in the case that outlawed affirmative action in college admissions, said it was "presumptively illegal" to ask for someone’s race when "no lawful use can be made of it."
"You can't have evidence of overt discrimination like this and not have someone come forward" as a plaintiff, Mortara told the Free Beacon at the time.