The order marks the latest Supreme Court win for Trump and allows the administration to forge ahead with canceling hundreds of grants while the lawsuit continues to unfold
The U.S Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the Trump administration can move forward with a plan to slash nearly $800 million of research funding from the National Institutes of Health in its push to cut federal diversity.
The high court’s ruling lifted a lower court’s order blocking the cuts made by the NIH to align with Republican President Donald Trumps priorities. The high court did keep Trump administration guidance on future funding blocked, however.
The court ruled 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the court’s three liberal justices in their dissent. The order marks the latest Supreme Court win for Trump and allows the administration to forge ahead with canceling hundreds of grants while the lawsuit continues to unfold. The plaintiffs, including states and public-health advocacy groups, have argued that the cuts will inflict incalculable losses in public health and human life.
The Justice Department, meanwhile, has said funding decisions should not be subject to judicial second-guessing and efforts to promote policies referred to as DEI can conceal insidious racial discrimination.
The lawsuit only addresses the estimated $12 billion of NIH research projects that have been cut by the Trump administration, but in its emergency appeal the administration also took aim at nearly two dozen other times judges have stood in the way of its funding cuts.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer said judges shouldnt be considering those cases under an earlier Supreme Court decision that cleared the way for teacher-training program cuts. He says they should go to federal claims court instead.
Five of the six conservative justices on the court agreed, with Justice Neil Gorsuch criticizing in his short opinion lower court judges for not adhering to earlier high court orders. All these interventions should have been unnecessary, Gorsuch wrote.
However, the plaintiffs, including 16 Democratic state attorneys general and public-health advocacy groups, argued that research grants are fundamentally different from the teacher-training contracts and couldnt be sent to claims court, where the justices said this case also belongs. Halting studies midway can also ruin the data already collected and ultimately harm the countrys potential for scientific breakthroughs by disrupting scientists work in the middle of their careers, they argued.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a lengthy dissent in which she criticized both the outcome and her colleagues willingness to continue allowing the administration to use the courts emergency appeals process.
A half paragraph of reasoning (issued without full briefing or any oral argument) thus suffices here to partially sustain the governments abrupt cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to support life-saving biomedical research, Jackson wrote.
In June, U.S. District Judge William Young in Massachusetts had ruled that the cancellations were arbitrary and discriminatory. Ive never seen government racial discrimination like this, Young, an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, said at a hearing. He later added: Have we no shame.
An appeals court had left Youngs ruling in place.
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