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A divided Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the Trump administration to cut nearly $800 million in National Institutes of Health grants for the study of diseases in minority, gay and transgender communities while legal battles over the funding play out in the lower courts.
The justices sided with the Trump administration, which argued that the research was unscientific, did not improve health, provided little return on investment, and went against the president’s efforts to root out initiatives related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.
Groups that filed the lawsuit to block the cuts said they represented “an unprecedented disruption to ongoing research” and threatened to undermine the NIH’s stature as a worldwide leader for diagnosing and treating illness.
Five of the court’s conservative justices voted to halt a lower-court ruling that ordered the administration to restore the funding. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined the three liberal justices in dissent.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson sharply criticized the majority’s ruling, saying it amounted to an “abrupt cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to support lifesaving biomedical research.”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett broke with the court’s conservatives on a separate issue: whether the lower court had jurisdiction to throw out the anti-DEI guidance that the administration used to justify the cuts. She, Roberts and the high court’s liberals said the lower court did have such jurisdiction, and upheld that part of its ruling.
The NIH, which funds research across the country and around the world, announced the cuts beginning in February following a three executive orders signed by President Donald Trump soon after he took office.
The orders sought to eliminate DEI programs in the federal government, while also targeting similar initiatives in the private sector and stopping federal funding that supports “gender ideology,” or the idea that someone might identify with a gender other than their birth sex.
“As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female,” Trump said in his inauguration speech.
Researchers, a union and more than a dozen Democratic-led states filed suits against the cuts in April.
The petitioners wrote in court filings that the NIH slashed more than 1,700 grants in a matter of months. They said the cancellations went beyond what is typically understood as relating to diversity, equity and inclusion.
They pointed to research that includes studies of cardiovascular health in the rural South, ways to reduce disparities in kidney disease, the connection between pollution from traffic and dementia-related diseases, covid-19, vaccine hesitancy, and the health effects of climate change.
“Even a brief stay would invalidate these and other multiyear projects, already paid for by Congress, in midstream, inflicting incalculable losses in public health and human life because of delays in bringing the fruits of Plaintiffs’ research to Americans who desperately await clinical advancements,” the petitioners wrote in a high court filing.
In June, a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the Trump administration to restore the funding, finding the cuts were “arbitrary and capricious” because the administration had not engaged in an analysis or reviewed any data to substantiate its claims that the studies were unscientific.
U.S. District Judge William Young, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, was scathing, saying at a hearing that it was “palpably clear” that the cuts were animated by racism and homophobia.
“I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” Young said, citing his 40 years on the bench.
Most of the cuts were restored.
The Trump administration has targeted the NIH for other major cuts. Officials moved to trim billions of dollars from the agency’s funding of indirect research costs at universities, but a federal judge issued a permanent injunction on those cuts. The Trump administration is appealing that ruling.
The Trump administration also requested a cut of as much as $18 billion from the NIH’s budget for the next fiscal year, which would amount to about 40 percent of its total funding. Some Democratic and Republican lawmakers have objected to that idea and proposed a budget increase.
The actions and others have prompted dozens of NIH staffers to sign a letter objecting to the administration’s approach.
In a case similar to the NIH one in April, the high court temporarily allowed the Trump administration to freeze up to $65 million in educational grants meant to address teacher shortages. The Trump administration said the money promoted DEI initiatives.
The justices’ ruling represents another victory for the Trump administration on the high court’s emergency docket, which is typically reserved for cases that require urgent action, such as stays on executions and lower court injunctions.
Trump officials have persuaded the justices to allow the administration to carry out some of its most significant policies—at least temporarily—in a flood of emergency appeals. The wins have cleared the way for the removal of transgender soldiers from the military, the cancellation of protections allowing hundreds of thousands of migrants to stay in the United States and the termination of jobs for thousands of federal employees.
Critics—including some of the liberal justices—have chided the court for deciding so many cases on the emergency docket and failing to offer adequate explanations for many of those rulings.
“Courts are supposed to explain things,” Justice Elena Kagan said during a recent public appearance in California. “That’s what courts do.”
The justices typically don’t hear oral arguments in emergency cases, and the briefings are limited. In addition to not explaining rulings on the emergency docket, the justices often don’t reveal who is in the majority in their decisions. The lack of transparency has led some to label emergency appeals the “shadow docket.”
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh pushed back on those criticisms in an appearance in Kansas City, Missouri, late last month. He said the justices have written more opinions as of late and sought to impose “more and more process to try to get the right answer on those preliminary assessments.”
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