The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday said that the Trump administration can go forward with plans to terminate about 900 National Institutes of Health grants concerning racial diversity, transgender people, and other topics that the agency has said are not aligned with its priorities.
The high court’s 5-4 decision came after a Massachusetts-based federal district judge in June ordered the grants to be restored, saying the government’s justification for terminating the projects was likely discriminatory.
The justices allowed one aspect of the district judge’s ruling to stand: the part that threw out the guidance document articulating the reasoning for the grant terminations.
Scott Delaney, a lawyer and co-founder of Grants Witness, a database that tracks grant terminations, said the ruling “allowed the NIH to keep its terminations in place, pending appeal, but it also prevented NIH from relying on its anti-DEI policies to continue canceling grants, pending appeal.”
The news means affected researchers will stop getting funding, said Scott Schneider, a Texas-based lawyer who works with colleges. “There’s no ifs, ands, or buts about it. It’s a bad day for the folks whose grants were initially terminated,” Schneider said.
The American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups that brought the lawsuit, said in a statement that the decision was a “significant setback” and that the legal team was assessing options.
The ruling came largely on technical grounds: The conservative justices said the researchers and organizations that sued over grant terminations would need to pursue complaints in a different venue, the Court of Federal Claims.
But doing so would “take many months, probably over a year,” Delaney said. And it’s not clear whether scientists would be able to pursue a class-action claim as a group or have to file 900-plus individual claims. “I see no viable, no reasonably likely scenario where that research comes back,” he added. “I think it’s gone.”
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