Higher ed groups ask Supreme Court to preserve lower court order to restore NIH grants

Dive Brief: 

The American Council on Education and other major higher education associations are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve a lower court’s ruling that ordered the National Institutes of Health to reinstate funding for hundreds of canceled grants. 
In June, a federal judge vacated NIH directives to nix grant funding for research related to diversity, equity and inclusion. The Trump administration quickly appealed the decision and asked the Supreme Court in July to pause the lower court’s order while an appeals court considers the case. 
Eight higher ed groups — including ACE, the Association of American Universities and the Association of American Medical Colleges — argued in legal filings Friday that allowing NIH to cancel the grants again would destabilize the nation’s biomedical research and waste government funding on projects forced to stop midstream. 

Dive Insight: 

President Donald Trump signed several executive orders shortly after beginning his second term that prompted the NIH cancellations. One ordered federal agencies to terminate all “equity-related” grants “to the maximum extent allowed by law,” and another directed them to end federal funding for “gender ideology,” which the administration defined as the idea that gender exists on a spectrum. 

Civil rights groups have noted that anti-LGBT groups use the term “gender ideology” to cast being transgender as a political movement rather than a fundamental identity. And the American Medical Association has said that “trans and non-binary gender identities are normal variations of human identity and expression.”

The Trump administration canceled vast sums of scientific research funding following those orders. In NIH’s case, the agency often informed researchers of the terminations by saying their work “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”

The moves quickly drew legal challenges. 

Researchers and unions argued in an April lawsuit that the move was “a reckless and illegal purge to stamp out NIH-funded research that addresses topics and populations that they disfavor.” A coalition of states also filed a lawsuit that month challenging the terminations. 

U.S. District Judge William Young agreed with their arguments, ordering NIH in June to restore the plaintiff’s canceled grants. According to a Monday press release from ACE, the order impacted roughly 1,200 grants — though that is only a fraction of the awards that the agency has terminated.

Since the order only covered the plaintiffs’ grants, ACE and other higher ed groups have also asked NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, in a July 29 letter, to reinstate the other awards canceled under the anti-DEI directives —  “in the spirit of fairness and consistency.” 

The Trump administration has appealed Young’s decision. So far, federal officials have asked both Young and the appellate court to block the order to reinstate the grants while the appeals process plays out. Both rejected that request. 

Then last month, the Trump administration took it to the Supreme Court. 

The higher education groups noted in their legal filings that grant applications undergo rigorous scientific review before NIH accepts them. 

“In recent months, however, the Executive Branch has jettisoned NIH’s scientific decisionmaking via agencywide directives that mandated the termination en masse of NIH grants deemed related to disfavored political topics,” their Friday filing argued. 

If those terminations are allowed to stand during the appeals process, critical medical research into diseases like Alzheimer’s and diabetes will be ground to a halt, they said. The groups noted some researchers have had to abandon projects halfway through and lay off staff and students with knowledge of the work. 

The Trump administration, meanwhile, has argued to the Supreme Court that Young didn’t have jurisdiction to order NIH to reinstate the grants, arguing instead that the matter should proceed in the Court of Federal Claims. In its emergency request, it pointed to the Supreme Court’s April ruling that allowed the U.S. Department of Education to maintain a freeze on $65 million in canceled grant funding for teacher training. 

In that ruling, the court’s unsigned majority opinion said the government likely wouldn’t be able to recover the funding once disbursed and added that the grant recipients would not “suffer irreparable harm” if a lower court’s order to reinstate the grants was put on hold during the appeals process. 

The Trump administration urged the Supreme Court to make a similar ruling in the NIH case.