The highest court in the US has ruled that the Trump administration can slash hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research funding on breast cancer, HIV prevention and suicide, among other issues, in its push to cut federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts.
In a 5-4 decision issued on Thursday, the Supreme Court lifted a judge’s order blocking $783m worth of cuts made by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to align with Republican President Donald Trump’s priorities.
The justices granted the Justice Department’s request to lift Boston-based US District Judge William Young’s decision in June that the grant terminations violated federal law, while a legal challenge brought by researchers and 16 US states plays out in a lower court.
The order marks the latest Supreme Court win for Trump and allows the administration to forge ahead with cancelling hundreds of grants while the lawsuit continues to unfold. The plaintiffs, including states and public-health advocacy groups, have argued that the cuts will inflict “incalculable losses in public health and human life”.
The NIH is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The cuts are part of Trump’s wide-ranging actions to reshape the US government, slash federal spending and end government support for programmes aimed at promoting diversity or “gender ideology” that the administration opposes.
The administration said Young’s ruling required the NIH to continue paying $783m in grants that run counter to its priorities.
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has sided with the administration in almost every case that it has been called upon to review since Trump returned to the presidency in January.
After Trump signed executive orders in January targeting DEI and gender ideology, NIH instructed staff to terminate grant funding for “low-value and off-mission” studies deemed related to these concepts, as well as COVID-19 and ways to curb vaccine hesitancy.
Young’s ruling came in two lawsuits challenging the cuts. One was filed by the American Public Health Association, individual researchers and other plaintiffs, who called the cuts an “ongoing ideological purge” targeting projects based on “vague, now-forbidden language”. The other was filed by the states, most of them Democratic-led.
The plaintiffs said the terminated grants included projects on breast cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, HIV prevention, suicide, depression and other conditions that often disproportionately burden minority communities, as well as grants mandated by Congress to train and support a diverse group of scientists in biomedical research.
Young, an appointee of former Republican President Ronald Reagan, invalidated the grant terminations in June. In a written ruling, the judge said they were “breathtakingly arbitrary and capricious”, violating a federal law governing the actions of agencies.
During a June hearing in the case, Young rebuked the administration for what he called a “darker aspect” to the case that the cuts represent “racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community”.
“I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,” the judge said.
Young also said the cuts were designed to stop research that bears on the health of the LGBTQ community. “That’s appalling,” the judge said.
The administration has argued that the litigation should have been brought in a different judicial body, the Washington-based Court of Federal Claims, which specialises in money damages claims against the US government.
That reasoning was also the basis for the Supreme Court’s decision in April that let Trump’s administration proceed with millions of dollars of cuts to teacher training grants, also targeted under the DEI crackdown.
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