The Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to cut off health research grants it contends advance diversity, equity and inclusion efforts or promote “gender ideology extremism.”
By a 5-4 vote, the justices lifted an order a federal court judge in Boston issued forcing the National Institutes of Health to restore funding for more than 1,700 grants focused on heart disease, HIV/AIDS, Alzheimer’s disease, alcohol and substance abuse and mental health issues.
Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s liberals in dissent from the court’s decision to permit the funding halt.
While Barrett voted with most of the court’s conservatives to let the administration stop the grant funding, she sided with Roberts and the liberals to form a majority that left in place the lower judge’s order voiding several NIH policies aimed at enforcing Trump’s anti-DEI edicts.
Since the ruling leaves the grant recipients without federal funds for now, the Trump administration seems certain to claim it as yet another in a flurry of wins in emergency appeals it has filed with the Supreme Court.
In a solo concurring opinion, Barrett indicated that the court’s ruling Thursday signaled that the grant recipients should have brought their claims for lost funding not to a district judge in Boston but to the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington, which hears disputes over federal contracts.
U.S. District Judge William Young ordered the health-related grants restored in June, following lawsuits filed by impacted grant recipients and 16 Democratic-led states complaining of cuts to programs at their state universities.
Young, a Reagan appointee, used unusually strident language to condemn the targeted cuts, many of which ended grants studying the impacts of disease on specific minority groups.
“This represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community,” the judge said of the cuts. “I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.”
However, in Thursday’s ruling, Justice Neil Gorsuch accused Young of defying the Supreme Court by not abiding by an emergency ruling it issued in April, allowing the Trump administration to cancel $64 million in teaching-related grants. (That 5-4 ruling also found Roberts in dissent along with the three liberal justices.)
“When this Court issues a decision, it constitutes a precedent that commands respect in lower courts,” Gorsuch declared, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson penned a blistering 21-page solo opinion calling the court’s latest ruling “bizarre” and complaining in particular about her colleagues “sending plaintiffs on a likely futile, multivenue quest for complete relief.” She even declared that the court’s decision will result in animals used in medical experiments being “euthanized.”
Jackson also repeated her past assertions that the high court is bending over backward to favor the Trump administration. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins,” she wrote.
In filings with the high court over the NIH funding, the Trump administration complained that Young’s order required the agency to “pay out over $783 million in grants,” but grant recipients argued that “figure appears to be invented out of whole cloth.”
Solicitor General John Sauer ridiculed some of the grants shut down by the administration, pointing to funding for programs exploring “intersectional, multilevel and multidimensional structural racism for English- and Spanish-speaking populations” and “anti-racist healing in nature.”
Sauer told the justices that a “comprehensive internal review” found the grants ran afoul of one or more of three executive orders President Donald Trump issued shortly after he returned to office in January. Two of the directives targeted DEI-related programs and grants, while the third sought to affirm “the immutable biological reality of sex” by ending policies and programs accommodating or benefiting transgender people.
Sauer also put forward the argument that appeared to carry the day Thursday: Congress has mandated legal disputes over federal government grants and contracts be pursued only in the Court of Federal Claims. That court could eventually award financial damages to grantees if it determines their grants were illegally terminated, but is unlikely to provide immediate relief, according to legal experts.
The Supreme Court’s ruling on the NIH grants is not a final decision on the legality of the grant terminations. But it means the administration can withhold the funding while the legal fight plays out.
The Trump administration has appealed Young’s ruling to the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals, which last month declined the administration’s request to put his decision on hold as the appeal proceeds.
