A federal judge on Monday declared some of the Trump administration’s cuts to National Institutes of Health grants “void and illegal,” accusing the government of racial discrimination and prejudice against L.G.B.T.Q. individuals.
Ruling from the bench, Judge William G. Young of the Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts delivered a damning assessment of the Trump administrations’ motives in targeting hundreds of grants that focused on the health of Black communities, women and L.G.B.T.Q. people. He ordered the government to restore much of that funding for now, pending an appeal.
“This represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s L.G.B.T.Q. community,” he said. “That’s what this is.”
Judge Young, a Reagan appointee with 40 years of experience as a federal judge, said the government’s rationale for canceling some of the grants, which also supported research into topics such as gender identity and equity in health care, appeared to be rooted in prejudice. He cited the administration’s very public efforts to eliminate any trace of diversity and equity initiatives from the federal government, as well as its attacks on transgender people.
He said that over the course of his career he had “never seen government racial discrimination like this,” and that he felt duty bound to state his conclusion about the government’s intent.
“I would be blind not to call it out,” he said.
Judge Young’s ruling echoed arguments during a brief trial earlier in the day in which lawyers from an array of groups said the grants had become a political target under President Trump.
Kenneth Parreno, a lawyer representing the American Public Health Association, called the government’s actions part of a campaign to ban what the administration saw as “forbidden topics” in science by canceling grants related to race or transgender health.
This is “a slapdash, harried effort to rubber stamp an ideological purge,” he said.
The Trump administration in March began terminating a number of N.I.H. grants supporting research on topics such as health equity, racial disparities, vaccine hesitancy and maternal health in minority communities, sometimes by scanning for certain terms.
For universities and laboratories that have seen science funding dry up over the past six months, the cuts only contributed to an atmosphere of anxiety. Universities that have come crosswise with the Trump administration, such as Harvard and Columbia, saw additional hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants evaporate.
In May, Mr. Trump followed up with an executive orderthat cited a “reproducibility crisis” in science. The order resurfaced policy disputes from the Covid-19 pandemic, among other things, to cast doubt on the value of science and justify profound changes to the government’s role supporting in research and development.
Besides the grants categorically identified as related to “diversity, equity and inclusion,” the Trump administration has also taken steps to slash funding for pandemic preparedness and chronic disease, citing the formal end of the Covid-19 pandemic. Last month, the budget blueprint President Trump submitted proposed steep cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services, and particularly the N.I.H.
During the trial earlier in the day on Monday, Judge Young grilled Thomas Ports, a lawyer from the Justice Department, over how the Trump administration could justify withdrawing funds that Congress had appropriated to the N.I.H. in service of its mission to “improve health, revolutionize science, and serve society.”
Mr. Ports replied that it was up to the leader of the N.I.H. to judge what research is worth pursuing, and that Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, Mr. Trump’s N.I.H. director, had effectively decided that research in fields such as gender identity was “not scientifically valuable.”
“The director of N.I.H. can make a judgment on what is an improvement of research, and what is not research not worth pursuing,” Mr. Ports said.
Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said that the agency “stands by its decision to end funding for research that prioritized ideological agendas,” and that it would explore whether to appeal the ruling.
In two cases that were heard together, a coalition of Democratic-led states and a coalition of researchers and unions, led by the American Public Health Association, each sued to stop a raft of cuts at the N.I.H., which they said jeopardized scientific progress.
Leading up to the ruling on Monday, Judge Young repeatedly pressed for details about the government’s decision making in terminating the grants, expressing deep skepticism that it had followed normal, dispassionate processes.
On several occasions, he expressed dismay that much of the publicly available information about the cancellations had to be gleaned from Grant Watch, an independent database put together by a small team of academics, who worked to piece together the extent of the Trump administration’s cuts through their crowdsourcing.
“The way that Grant Watch is being used right now by the courts really vindicates the bravery of all the scientists who stepped forward publicly and told us that their grants were terminated, which is a difficult thing to do,” Scott Delaney, one of the project’s leaders, said in an interview.
On Monday, over several hours of arguments, Judge Young wrestled with the long legacy of racial injustice in the United States, and the Trump administration’s claims that it is, in fact, the D.E.I. initiatives that are racist, allocating federal dollars to benefit certain groups over others on the basis of race.
But he concluded that when it came to unlawful discrimination, it was the Trump administration that had wound up harming underserved groups.
“You see, I do understand — believe me — I understand that the extirpation of affirmative action is today a valid government position,” he said. “I understand that affirmative action had various invidious calculus based upon the race; that’s not a license to discriminate.”
Judge Young said he would release a longer opinion explaining his reasoning.
But the opinion on Monday marked at least a temporary win for the academic community, and amounted to a remarkable rebuke of the Trump administration’s record, which caused Judge Young to repeatedly question the government’s good faith.
“How have we fallen so low?” he said. “Have we no shame?”
Zach Montague is a Times reporter covering the U.S. Department of Education, the White House and federal courts.
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