High court OKs pause of $800 million in NIH grants
About $800 million in funding for hundreds of federal research grants related to topics such as health disparities, LGBTQ+ health, and vaccines can be paused while the grants’ fate is litigated, the Supreme Court ruled on August 22.
The roughly 800 grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had been terminated in the early months of the Trump presidency and later ordered reinstated by a federal judge. The new Supreme Court decision allows the Trump administration to pause grant payments while it appeals the federal judge’s ruling.
According to the Supreme Court, the plaintiffs in the case—the American Public Health Association, the United Auto Workers union, and 22 states—filed their suit in the wrong court.
In an August 22 Science article, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Scott Delaney said that the court’s reasoning—that all grant termination litigation must go to the Court of Federal Claims, which handles contract disputes—means that “there’s a very good chance that that whole case [to reinstate terminated grants in federal district court] will disappear.” That’s because the Supreme Court’s ruling suggests that the district court does not have jurisdiction to reinstate the grants. Delaney—a research scientist in the Department of Environmental Health and the creator of Grant Witness, a website that catalogs all the grants canceled by the Trump administration—said he thinks that other legal challenges to grant cancellations could be dealt with similarly. The high court ruling “gives the government a very, very big arrow in its quiver for all of those cases,” he said.
Dougie Zubizarreta, a PhD student at Harvard Chan School, was quoted in a WGBH article about the impact of the Trump cuts on their research. They’d been conducting research on mental health inequities among LGBTQ people, but lost federal funding, so is putting that work aside.
Zubizarreta’s plan is to focus on mental health more broadly. They said, “It will require rethinking in terms of how to do equity work, essentially, in a climate where equity is not a focus—which is a boat that many of us in public health are in.”
Read the Science article: Supreme Court upholds Trump cancellation of NIH grants
Read the WGBH article: Scientists’ research again in limbo as Supreme Court rule $800 million in funding can be paused
Learn more
Federal judge rules hundreds of NIH grant terminations illegal (Harvard Chan School news)
