The Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to axe $783 million in federal research funding, reversing a lower court’s decision that required the National Institutes of Health to keep funding the terminated grants.
The 5-4 vote greenlights the NIH's prior termination of grants related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) measures, according to the Aug. 21 court opinion (PDF).
The high court said a district court didn’t have the power to make claims based on the research-related grants or to order relief to enforce any monetary “obligation” tied to the grants.
The justices also cited their reasoning behind a prior decision when they allowed the Trump administration to continue defunding the Department of Education, determining that a federal judge didn't have the power to order the government to make payments.
In the NIH case, the Supreme Court also said that the U.S. government would face “irreparable harm” if it paid out the money for the grants and then couldn’t recover that money.
However, the court did block Trump’s anti-DEI guidance for future funding, again in a 5-4 vote.
On both matters, Justice Amy Coney Barrett delivered the key vote, joining Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch in the decision to permit the grant terminations. On the issue of DEI guidance documents, Coney Barrett joined Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson to keep the lower court’s ruling in place.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson penned an extensive dissent about the grant termination decision, criticizing both the outcome and the Department of Education case as well.
Before the ruling, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) filed an amicus brief opposing a potential stay on the lower court’s decision. An amicus brief is submitted by a party that isn’t directly involved in a lawsuit, but has deep contextual insight or is affected by the case at hand.
“Make no mistake: This was a decision critical to the future of the nation, and the Supreme Court made the wrong choice,” the nonprofit AAMC, which represents people in medical education, clinical care and biomedical research, said in an Aug. 21 statement after the ruling.
“History will look upon these mass National Institutes of Health research grant terminations with shame,” the AAMC continued. “The Court has turned a blind eye to this grievous attack on science and medicine, and we call upon Congress to take action to restore the rule of law at NIH.”
The case—which was brought to the courts by several states, plus public health and civil rights organizations—was filed back in April. In it, the plaintiffs argued that the Trump administration was "putting politics before public health and risking lives and livelihoods in the process.”
In June, a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled that the $783 million in slashed grants were arbitrary and discriminatory, ordering that the cut funds be restored immediately.
“I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” U.S. District Judge and Ronald Reagan appointee William Young said at the time. “It is palpably clear these directives and the set of terminated grants here also are designed to frustrate, to stop research that may bear on the health ... of Americans. Of our LGBTQ community. That's appalling.”
Earlier this month, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Trump administration broke the law by withholding funds that Congress had allocated to the NIH. The office's decisions are non-binding but are designed to provide Congress with objective, non-partisan analysis. GAO said it would update its decision if a court made relevant decisions related to the matter.
Recently, the NIH has had an annual budget of nearly $48 billion, making the agency the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research. Under Trump, federal health agencies have started to pull funding for science that doesn’t align with his executive orders, which declare that the U.S. government only recognizes two sexes and demand that diversity efforts are dismantled.
Overall, it’s estimated that NIH has slashed $12 billion in research funding under Trump’s most recent administration.