The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration can proceed with sweeping cuts to National Institutes of Health grants for research as part of a crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and transgender identity.
The high court granted the Department of Justice's request to lift Boston-based U.S. District Judge William Young's decision in June that the grant terminations violated federal law, while a legal challenge brought by researchers and 16 states plays out in a lower court.
The NIH is the world's largest funder of biomedical research. The cuts are part of President Donald Trump's wide-ranging actions to reshape the federal government, slash spending and end government support for programs aimed at promoting DIE or gender ideology.
The administration said Young's ruling required the NIH to continue paying $783 million in grants that run counter to its priorities.
The administration repeatedly has sought the Supreme Court's intervention to allow implementation of Trump policies impeded by lower courts. The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has sided with the administration in almost every case that it has been called upon to review since Trump returned to the presidency in January.
After Trump signed executive orders in January targeting DEI and gender ideology, the NIH instructed staff to terminate grant funding for "low-value and off-mission" studies deemed related to these concepts, as well as COVID-19 and ways to curb vaccine hesitancy.
Young's ruling came in two lawsuits challenging the cuts. One was filed by the American Public Health Association, individual researchers and other plaintiffs who called the cuts an "ongoing ideological purge" targeting projects based on "vague, now-forbidden language." The other was filed by the states, most of them Democrat-led.
The plaintiffs said the terminated grants included projects on breast cancer, Alzheimer's disease, HIV prevention, suicide, depression and other conditions that often disproportionately burden minority communities, as well as grants mandated by Congress to train and support a diverse group of scientists in biomedical research.
Young, an appointee Ronald Reagan, invalidated the grant terminations in June. In a written ruling, he said they were "breathtakingly arbitrary and capricious," violating a federal law governing the actions of agencies.
The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on July 18 denied the administration's request to put Young's decision on hold. The administration argued that the litigation should have been brought in a different judicial body, the Washington-based Court of Federal Claims, which specializes in money damages claims against the federal government.
That reasoning was also the basis for the Supreme Court's decision in April that let Trump's administration proceed with millions of dollars of cuts to teacher training grants also targeted under the DEI crackdown.