Tag: NIH

  • ‘Wrong and deeply disappointing’: Supreme Court halts order restoring NIH grants

    ‘Wrong and deeply disappointing’: Supreme Court halts order restoring NIH grants

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    Dive Brief:

    • The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday dealt a blow to universities and other research institutions seeking to restore grants cut in mass by the National Institutes of Health.
    • Researchers, unions and associations sued NIH this spring after the agency abruptly terminated millions of dollars in grants for projects that dealt with diversity, equity and inclusion.
    • In a 5-4 decision, conservative justices on the Supreme Court paused a June order that would have restored $783 million in funding, ruling that the district court lacked jurisdiction to handle the grant restoration. However, the court declined to block the lower court’s order that deemed NIH’s guidance that led to the cuts illegal.

    Dive Insight:

    With the Supreme Court decision, those who have seen grant funding cut by NIH could face a longer, more complicated path through another federal court to have their awards restored.

    In their April complaint, plaintiffs accused NIH of “launching a reckless and illegal purge to stamp out NIH-funded research that addresses topics and populations that they disfavor.”

    They tallied 678 terminated projects resulting in $1.3 billion already spent by the government on projects “stopped midstream” being wasted, and another $1.1 billion that had yet to be spent.

    When U.S. District Judge William Young ruled against NIH in June, he blasted the agency for what he saw as discrimination, both racial and against LGBTQ+ communities, in its purge of research funding. 

    “Have we no shame,” said Young, a Reagan appointee, according to a report from The Associated Press. 

    Earlier this month, the watchdog agency U.S. Government Accountability Office also determined that NIH acted illegally in its DEI cuts. 

    The Supreme Court did not block Young’s ruling that NIH’s guidance that led to the agency cutting DEI research funding was illegal. That ruling is still being litigated in appellate court.

    Instead, the ruling majority determined that the U.S. Court of Federal Claims — which hears monetary claims against the federal government — is the venue for handling terminated grants. 

    Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell, who has been active in fighting the Trump administration’s various moves to cut federal research funding, blasted the Supreme Court’s ruling on Friday. 

    “The Supreme Court’s decision is wrong and deeply disappointing,” Campbell said in a statement. “Even though the Court did not dispute that the Trump Administration’s decision to cut critical medical and public health research is illegal, they ordered the recipients of that funding — hospitals, researchers, and the state — to jump through more hoops to get it back.”

    The Supreme Court’s split decision brought internal dissent as well. In a minority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts, who joined the court’s liberal justices, wrote that “if the District Court had jurisdiction to vacate the directives, it also had jurisdiction to vacate the ‘Resulting Grant Terminations.’”

    In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson rebuked the majority’s opinion. 

    “By today’s order, an evenly divided Court neuters judicial review of grant terminations by sending plaintiffs on a likely futile, multivenue quest for complete relief,” she wrote, adding that the court “lobs this grenade” without considering Congress’ intent or the “profound” consequences of the ruling. 

    “Stated simply: With potentially life-saving scientific advancements on the line, the Court turns a nearly century-old statute aimed at remedying unreasoned agency decisionmaking into a gauntlet rather than a refuge,” Jackson said in the dissent.

    Clarification: This article has been updated to clarify the nature of the Supreme Court decision.

     

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  • SCOTUS Says NIH Doesn’t Have to Restore Canceled Grants

    SCOTUS Says NIH Doesn’t Have to Restore Canceled Grants

    The National Institutes of Health has canceled hundreds of grants that explore topics the Trump administration dislikes.

    iStock Editorial/Getty Images Plus

    The United States Supreme Court is allowing the National Institutes of Health to cut nearly $800 million in grants, though it left the door open for the researchers to seek relief elsewhere.

    In a 5-to-4 decision issued Thursday, the court paused a Massachusetts district court judge’s June decision to reinstate grants that were terminated because they didn’t align with the NIH’s new ideological priorities. Most of the canceled grants mentioned diversity, equity and inclusion goals; gender identity; COVID; and other topics the Trump administration has banned funding for. The district judge, in ruling against the administration, said he’d “never seen racial discrimination by the government like this.”

    Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote that the district court “likely lacked jurisdiction to hear challenges to the grant terminations, which belong in the Court of Federal Claims,” with which Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito Jr., Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh agreed.

    “The reason is straightforward,” Kavanaugh wrote. “The core of plaintiffs’ suit alleges that the government unlawfully terminated their grants. That is a breach of contract claim. And under the Tucker Act, such claims must be brought in the Court of Federal Claims, not federal district court.”

    The court’s emergency order came after more than a dozen Democratic attorneys general and groups representing university researchers challenged the terminations in federal court.

    “We are very disappointed by the Supreme Court’s ruling that our challenge to the sweeping termination of hundreds of critical biomedical research grants likely belongs in the Court of Federal Claims,” the American Civil Liberties Union, which is part of the legal team that is suing the NIH over the grant terminations, wrote in a statement Thursday evening. “This decision is a significant setback for public health. We are assessing our options but will work diligently to ensure that these unlawfully terminated grants continue to be restored.”

    Earlier this month, higher education associations and others urged the court to uphold the district court’s order, arguing that the terminations have “squandered” government resources and halted potentially lifesaving research.

    “The magnitude of NIH’s recent actions is unprecedented, and the agency’s abrupt shift from its longstanding commitments to scientific advancement has thrown the research community into disarray,” the groups wrote in an Aug. 1 brief. “This seismic shock to the NIH research landscape has had immediate and devastating effects, and granting a stay here will ensure that the reverberations will be felt for years to come.”

    Chief Justice John Roberts, who often sides with the conservative justices, joined liberal justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan in a dissent.

    “By today’s order, an evenly divided Court neuters judicial review of grant terminations by sending plaintiffs on a likely futile, multivenue quest for complete relief,” Jackson wrote. “Neither party to the case suggested this convoluted procedural outcome, and no prior court has held that the law requires it.”

    However, Barrett joined Roberts, Jackson, Sotomayor and Kagan in agreeing that the district court can review NIH’s reasoning for the terminations, and the justices kept in place a court order blocking the guidance that led to cancellations.

    “It is important to note that the Supreme Court declined to stay the District Court’s conclusion that the NIH’s directives were unreasonable and unlawful,” the ACLU said in a statement. “This means that NIH cannot terminate any research studies based on these unlawful directives.”

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  • NIH Director Orders Review of All Current, Planned Research

    NIH Director Orders Review of All Current, Planned Research

    NIH director Jay Bhattacharya said that among other priorities, the agency will focus on artificial intelligence and “ensuring evidence-based health care for children and teenagers identifying as transgender.”

    Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

    The National Institutes of Health’s director ordered employees to “conduct an individualized review of all current and planned research activities,” including active grants and funding opportunity announcements, according to images of a document provided to Inside Higher Ed. The review comes amid concerns that the NIH won’t distribute all of its allocated grant money by the time the federal fiscal year ends Sept. 30, meaning those dollars will return to the U.S. Treasury.

    The document images, provided by a source who wished to remain anonymous due to fear of retaliation, show that NIH director Jay Bhattacharya sent the memo Friday and that the review is effective immediately. According to the memo, “relevant NIH personnel” must review grants, funding opportunity announcements, contracts, contract solicitations, applications for new and competing renewal awards, intramural research and research training programs, cooperative agreements, and “other transactions.”

    Science reported earlier on the review.

    The order is part of a larger memo in which Bhattacharya outlined “select agency priorities” and said projects that don’t align with these priorities may be “restricted, paused, not renewed, or terminated.” The focuses are, among other things, artificial intelligence, “furthering our understanding of autism” and “ensuring evidence-based health care for children and teenagers identifying as transgender.”

    In response to a request for an interview about the review and why it’s needed, the NIH press team sent a public statement from Friday, in which Bhattacharya listed the priorities.

    Regarding health care for transgender youth, he said, “There are clearly more promising avenues of research that can be taken to improve the health of these populations than to conduct studies that involve the use of puberty suppression, hormone therapy, or surgical intervention.” He says that “by contrast, research that aims to identify and treat the harms these therapies and procedures have potentially caused … and how to best address the needs of these individuals so that they may live long, healthy lives is more promising.”

    Bhattacharya’s letter comes after President Trump, earlier this month, ordered senior appointees at federal agencies to annually review discretionary grants “for consistency with agency priorities.”

    Joanne Padrón Carney, chief government relations officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said in a statement to Inside Higher Ed that the president’s budget request for fiscal year 2026 already outlined a set priorities for the rest of the current year.

    “Switching gears at this stage reinforces confusion, diminishes trust, and increases concerns within the scientific community,” Carney added. “It joins the long list of tactics risking impoundment of congressionally appropriated funds rather than funding biomedical research that is essential for the people’s well-being.”

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  • Trump administration illegally axed NIH grants, government watchdog says

    Trump administration illegally axed NIH grants, government watchdog says

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    Dive Brief:

    • The Trump administration acted illegally when it delayed and canceled billions of dollars of biomedical research grants, despite Congress appropriating funds to the National Institutes of Health, the Government Accountability Office said on Tuesday. 
    • Between February and June, the watchdog agency estimates the NIH awarded about $8 billion less in funds for research grants and awards compared to the prior year and cut more than 1,800 active grants as it attempted to follow President Donald Trump’s directive to weed out “equity-related” projects.
    • The GAO’s report concludes the administration violated the Impoundment Control Act, which requires the president to provide notice before delaying or blocking congressionally directed spending. GAO can file a lawsuit in an attempt to restore the grants. However, the watchdog agency has not yet opted to do so in its dealings with Trump.

    Dive Insight:

    NIH grants came under scrutiny this winter following a series of executive orders directing federal agencies to terminate “equity-related” grants or contracts, federal funding of projects supporting “gender ideology” and DEI programs. 

    The NIH began carrying out these directives in February. In addition to the grant cuts, the agency also dragged its feet on approving new projects, GAO found. From late January to early March, the NIH paused grant reviews entirely, delaying funds from being allocated to hospitals and universities.

    When contacted for comment, a spokesperson for the HHS referred Healthcare Dive to the agency’s testimony to GAO. The testimony states that NIH has since “moved rapidly to reschedule and hold meetings impacted by the short pause, and to process grant applications.”

    The HHS said between March 24 and June 30, NIH scheduled or held 837 peer review meetings — 186 more than for the same period the year prior.

    Still, GAO said that the department hadn’t adequately explained its decision to pause the review process in the first place, despite its resumption of grant review.

    “If the executive branch wishes to make changes to the appropriation provided to NIH, it must propose funds for rescission or otherwise propose legislation to make changes to the law for consideration by Congress,” the watchdog group wrote in its report. The HHS had done neither, the GAO said, adding: “In short, HHS has offered no evidence that it did not withhold amounts from obligation or expenditure, and it has not shown that the delay was a permissible programmatic one.”

    The report also suggests the Trump administration may be continuing efforts to block NIH funds from flowing to medical research.

    The office said the Office of Management and Budget asked NIH to “pause the issuing of grants, research contracts and training” in late July. There are reports that decision was later reversed, but GAO said it could not confirm whether the pause was lifted.

    Following the release of the report, Democratic lawmakers called for the Trump administration to resume funding NIH grants as Congress specified, warning that medical research progress is at stake.

    “Cutting off investments Congress has made into research that saves millions of lives is as backward and as inexcusable as it gets,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., in a statement. “It is critical President Trump reverse course, stop decimating the NIH, and get every last bit of this funding out.”

    This report is not the first time Trump’s funding cuts have been challenged.

    Researchers, unions and a coalition of 16 states sued over the NIH cuts, with academics saying they needed the funds to perform critical medical research, including learning about alcohol’s impact on Alzheimer’s risk and suicide prevention among LGBTQ+ youth experiencing homelessness. In June, a U.S. district judge ordered the NIH to reinstate the plaintiffs’ canceled funds. However, litigation remains ongoing after the Trump administration appealed that ruling.

    GAO has the potential to bring its own suit against the NIH, but it will likely be a last resort, according to reporting by the New York Times. The watchdog group has previously found the administration violated the ICA on a range of topics and opted not to sue.

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

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

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    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.

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  • Abrupt Pause, Unpause of Grants Doesn’t End NIH Funding Woe

    Abrupt Pause, Unpause of Grants Doesn’t End NIH Funding Woe

    The Tuesday night news quickly sowed alarm among researchers: Media outlets reported that the Trump administration had stopped the National Institutes of Health from funding any new grants. The Wall Street Journal wrote that “certain grants that are up for renewal” were also cut off, and STAT, along with other outlets, later confirmed that reporting.

    The newspaper reported that the Office of Management and Budget was blocking these billions of dollars in research funding for the rest of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30. After that, the dollars would return, unspent, to the Treasury. This nationwide halt to grants stemmed from an OMB footnote in a budget document, the Journal reported, adding that “the fourth quarter of the fiscal year is typically the busiest for grant-giving institutes at the NIH.”

    Inside Higher Ed reviewed screenshots of an email from an NIH employee saying, “Research grant, R&D contract, or training awards cannot be issued during this pause.” The funding halt would’ve meant an end to new research to help find and improve cures and treatments for diseases as well as stanched the flow of federal dollars to already financially beleaguered universities and labs nationwide.

    “This is undeniably an unforced error, since this will not only harm current and future American patients, but the disruptive and chilling effect of this sudden holding back of promised funds will further jeopardize the future of the American medical research enterprise,” Association of American Universities president Barbara R. Snyder said a statement Tuesday.

    But before the night was over, the Trump administration appeared to reverse course. In an updated article citing unnamed sources, the Journal reported that unnamed “senior White House officials intervened.” (OMB is part of the executive branch.) The Journal said officials at the Health and Human Services Department, which includes NIH, fought the pause for days, but OMB only relented after the newspaper published its initial story Tuesday.

    In response to Inside Higher Ed’s written questions and interview requests about the situation Wednesday, the White House and HHS both sent the same statement from an HHS spokesperson: “The programmatic review is over. The funds are out.”

    One OMB spokesperson posted on X that OMB had been “waiting for more information from NIH” before releasing the funds.

    The NIH is one of the largest sources of funding for research at colleges and universities, and it touts itself as the “largest single public funder of biomedical and behavioral research in the world.” Tuesday night’s controversy wasn’t the first—and likely won’t be the last—upheaval that this crucial agency has faced under the Trump administration.

    From grant cancellations to the White House proposal to slash the agency’s budget by 40 percent for the next fiscal year, institutions and researchers have seen the flow of NIH grant money stymied. Atop all this, the reportedly now-abandoned move by OMB to stop grant awards highlights continuing concerns about the fate of the grant dollars that the NIH still hasn’t given out this current fiscal year.

    Since Trump took office, the NIH has awarded fewer grants compared to previous years, multiple analyses have found. A former NIH official estimated to Science that at least $6 billion of the agency’s $48 billion budget could be sent back. In a higher estimate, Sen. Patty Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement that what OMB reportedly tried to do before reversing course Tuesday “would choke off approximately $15 billion in funding that would otherwise go to institutions across the country.”

    A nongovernment official familiar with the NIH appropriations process told Inside Higher Ed that, within a sample of major universities surveyed, institutions are down 20 to 48 percent in NIH award and renewal funds compared to the same time last year.

    The official, who requested anonymity to maintain relationships with people within the administration, said Wednesday that there’s been “a very, very slow spend at NIH, even prior to last night’s fire drill.” The official said they don’t think NIH has ever had to push out so much remaining money in such a short time, and there’s “a very small amount of NIH staff left to allocate those funds.”

    Heather Pierce, senior director for science policy at the Association of American Medical Colleges, told Inside Higher Ed that Tuesday’s news “caused a real concern across the research enterprise very quickly. This is a community that has seen not just threats but actual damaging changes to the typically stable federally funded research grants take place overnight, or even faster.

    “By any measure, the pace of grant funding is a fraction of what it has been in any other year, and that includes grant renewals, that includes new funding opportunities,“ Pierce added. “And the pace with which grant applications are reviewed and awarded is far below what we’ve seen in the past, and that includes applications that were submitted a long time ago that have already been scored and gotten very competitive scores that would be expected to be funded.”

    Joanne Padrón Carney, chief government relations officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, said the reported freeze “just reinforced the current mood among researchers that the future of scientific research at NIH is still in question and could change at a moment’s notice, but also that this isn’t just about NIH. This cloud of uncertainty hovers over other agencies as well, such as the National Science Foundation.”

    Carney added that “the head of the Office of Management and Budget has made public his interest in reducing spending and reducing the size of government and using what tools that he is able to use to do that.”

    Russell Vought, head of OMB, hasn’t sworn off using rescission legislation, which can be passed with a simple majority in both chambers of Congress, to take back already appropriated funds during a fiscal year. NPR also reported that he’s called Congress’s spending bills “a ceiling … not a floor.”

    Murray, who represents Washington State, previously warned that the Trump administration’s use of such legislation to claw back funds already appropriated for this fiscal year—like it recently did for public broadcasting money—could scuttle consensus on the budget for next fiscal year.

    Carney attributed the slowdown in NIH grants to multiple factors, including the regular change in presidential administrations, Congress adopting a continuing resolution instead of a budget for this fiscal year and the Trump administration’s executive orders and other actions.

    “It’s like throwing sand into the machine,” Carney said. She said her association is pleased “that the funding will continue to flow, but it’s still unknown whether that flow of funds will be in drips or will be full stream, and we only have two months left until the end of the fiscal year.”

    Some Senate Republicans recently called on NIH and OMB to send more money out the door, as directed in the continuing resolution Congress passed in March.

    “We are concerned by the slow disbursement rate of [fiscal year 2025] NIH funds, as it risks undermining critical research and the thousands of American jobs it supports,” the senators wrote in a letter to OMB. “Suspension of these appropriated funds—whether formally withheld or functionally delayed—could threaten Americans’ ability to access better treatments and limit our nation’s leadership in biomedical science. It also risks inadvertently severing ongoing NIH-funded research prior to actionable results.”

    Tuesday night’s controversy came as some Republican members of Congress have joined Democrats in opposing the president’s proposal to gut the NIH’s funding for fiscal 2026. The Senate Appropriations Committee is meeting today, and it’s set to unveil how much it plans to send NIH next fiscal year.

    Carney said, “The U.S. is considered a global leader in biomedical research and medical discoveries, and we can’t afford to lose opportunities for advancing new discoveries and therapies and treatments for diseases that affect millions all over the world.

    “So when it comes to Alzheimer’s or cancer or infectious diseases, this is about hope,” she said. “It shouldn’t be about politics.”

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  • Lawsuit Over NIH Grant Funding Heads to Supreme Court

    Lawsuit Over NIH Grant Funding Heads to Supreme Court

    The NIH has cut hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding that it says is used to conduct illegal DEI and gender identity-related research.

    Photo illustration by Justin Morrison/Inside Higher Ed | Adam Bartosik and Jacob Wackerhausen/iStock/Getty Images

    The Trump administration has taken its fight over grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health to the Supreme Court, requesting permission Thursday to finalize millions of dollars in award cuts, CBS News reported.

    President Trump began slashing research funding shortly after he took office in January, targeting projects that allegedly defied his executive orders against issues such as gender identity and DEI. By early April, 16 states and multiple academic associations and advocacy groups had sued, arguing the funding cuts were an unjustified executive overreach and bypassed statutory procedures.

    Since then, a federal district court ordered a preliminary injunction requiring all grants to be reinstated, and a court of appeals denied the Trump administration’s request to halt the decision. Now, executive branch legal officials are taking the case to the highest court.

    In an emergency appeal, Solicitor General John Sauer wrote that the NIH is attempting to “stop errant district courts from continuing to disregard” presidential orders.

    The solicitor also pointed to an April ruling from the Supreme Court allowing the Department of Education to terminate some of its own grants for similar reasons. In that case, the justices said the Trump administration would likely be able to prove that the lower court lacked jurisdiction to mandate the payment of a federal award.

    The court system does not allow a “lower-court free-for-all where individual district judges feel free to elevate their own policy judgments over those of the Executive Branch, and their own legal judgments over those of this Court,” Sauer wrote.

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  • Researchers “Cautiously Optimistic” NIH Will Restore Grants

    Researchers “Cautiously Optimistic” NIH Will Restore Grants

    Months after individual researchers, advocacy groups and a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general filed two lawsuits against the National Institutes of Health for terminating hundreds of active research grants misaligned with the Trump administration’s ideologies, some scientists are hopeful that the agency will soon restore the grants and allow them to resume their research.

    Last week, a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the NIH to restore the roughly 900 grants named in the lawsuits, including many focused on studying vaccine hesitancy, LGBTQ+ health and diversity, equity and inclusion in the medical field. U.S. District Judge William Young, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, ruled the terminations void and unlawful, stating during a hearing that in all his years on the bench he’d “never seen” discrimination by the government to this extent.

    Although Science reported Thursday morning that the NIH has internally communicated plans to restore those grants “as soon as practicable”—and also cease further grant terminations—researchers say they still don’t know when they can expect to get the money they were promised.

    “Since the ruling, we are really encouraged,” said Heidi Moseson, a plaintiff in one of the cases and a senior researcher at Ibis Reproductive Health. “But we haven’t heard anything from the NIH about our grants being reinstated, and we don’t have a window into what that process looks like.”

    Back in March, Moseson received a letter from the agency terminating her grant, which was aimed at improving the accuracy of data collected in sexual and reproductive health research for all people, including those who identify as transgender and gender diverse. The award “no longer effectuates agency priorities,” the letter said. “Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans.”

    The NIH did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment on its specific plans for restoring the terminated grants.

    Appeal Anxiety

    Moseson said each week that goes by with the grant on pause “is another week where people are not being appropriately screened into clinical care and research that would be relevant for their bodies, leading to missed preventative care or, conversely, unnecessary preventive care.”

    While her team is ready to resume their research as soon as the NIH restores the funding in accordance with the judge’s ruling, she’s bracing for further disruptions ahead, depending on what happens with the appeals process.

    On Monday, the NIH filed a notice of appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. It also filed a motion to stay the judge’s order to restore the grants while pending the appeal, but Young denied that motion on Tuesday, noting that a stay “would cause irreparable harm to the plaintiffs.”

    “This is a case in equity concerning health research already bought and paid for by the Congress of the United States through funds appropriated for expenditure and properly allocated during this fiscal year,” the judge wrote. “Even a day’s delay further destroys the unmistakable legislative purpose from its accomplishment.”

    The following day, Michelle Bulls, a senior NIH official who oversees extramural funding, told staffers in an email that the agency must restore funding for the hundreds of projects identified by the plaintiffs, Science reported. “Please proceed with taking action on this request as part of the first phase of our compliance with the court’s judgment,” Bulls wrote, noting that “additional information is forthcoming.”

    Noam Ross, executive director at rOpenSci, a nonprofit that supports reproducible open research, and co-founder of the website Grant Watch, which is tracking grant terminations, put out a call for information on LinkedIn Wednesday about any grants the NIH has restored. But he told Inside Higher Ed Thursday afternoon that he has yet to receive any verified reports of restored NIH grants.

    Shalini Goel Agarwal, counsel for Protect Democracy, a nonprofit focused on combating perceived authoritarian threats, and one of the lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said Thursday morning that she also had not yet heard of any researchers getting grant money the NIH previously terminated.

    Though it’s not clear what could come of the government’s effort to appeal Young’s ruling, “at this moment the judge’s order is in effect and the NIH should be returning money to the researchers whose grants were terminated,” she said. “NIH should right now be undoing the effects of its directives.”

    ‘Cautiously Optimistic’

    Katie Edwards, a social work professor at the University of Michigan and a plaintiff in one of the cases, said that as of Thursday afternoon, she had yet to receive any communication from the NIH about its plans to restore her numerous multiyear grants.

    Edwards, whose research focuses on Indigenous and LGBTQ+ youth, said that delaying the grants much longer will undermine the research she’s already started, to the detriment of public health research.

    “For some of our studies, it’s just a matter of weeks before they’ll be really hard if not impossible to restart. I’m feeling a lot of anxiety,” she said. “We’re in a waiting phase, but I’m trying to be cautiously optimistic.”

    Despite the uncertainty of what’s ahead, she did get some reassuring news from the NIH on Thursday. The agency notified her that it approved her bid for a new three-year, $710,000 grant to develop and evaluate a self-defense program for adult women survivors of sexual violence. Like many other applications for new grants, the application had been in limbo for months. “So something (good??) is going on there!” she said in an email.

    Other cases moving through the courts also look promising for federally funded researchers eager to get their grants restored.

    On Monday, U.S. District Court Judge Rita Lin ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency, the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities had also unlawfully terminated grants that had already been awarded to researchers in the University of California’s 10-campus system. The judge, a Biden appointee, ordered the government to restore them, adding that she is weighing extending the order to 13 other federal agencies, including the NIH.

    “Many of the cases that are making their way through the courts share claims that are being made about the illegality of the federal government’s actions,” said Olga Akselrod, counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union and a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in one of the suits against the NIH. “Any time we have a win in one of these cases it’s an important statement of the applicable law, and that’s relevant for all of the cases that are proceeding.”

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  • NIH Staff Lambaste Agency Head for Censorship of Science

    NIH Staff Lambaste Agency Head for Censorship of Science

    More than 300 NIH employees criticized their director, Jay Bhattacharya, in the letter published Monday.

    Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

    Hundreds of staff at the National Institutes of Health are publicly condemning the agency’s actions in recent months, including firing thousands of workers and canceling research grants for projects that don’t align with the Trump administration’s ideologies. 

    In a letter sent Monday morning to Jay Bhattacharya, the Trump-appointed NIH director who gained notoriety for his criticism of the NIH’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than 300 employees from across the agency called on him to deliver on his promise to embrace dissent, which he has called “the very essence of science.”

    “We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources,” states the letter, titled the Bethesda Declaration (Bethesda, Md., is the location of the NIH’s main campus) and modeled after Bhattacharya’s own Great Barrington Declaration, which condemned the NIH in 2020 for ignoring his calls to mostly cease pandemic-related precautions.

    “This censorship is incompatible with academic freedom, which should not be applied selectively based on political ideology.”

    In addition to accusing Bhattacharya of politicizing research, the letter published Monday also criticized the agency for “undermining” peer review, unilaterally capping indirect costs and firing NIH staff. 

    Bhattacharya is scheduled to appear before the Senate appropriations subcommittee today to discuss Trump’s proposal to cut $18 billion or about 40 percent from the NIH’s budget.

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  • A Michigan research professor explains how NIH funding works − and what it means to suddenly lose a grant – Campus Review

    A Michigan research professor explains how NIH funding works − and what it means to suddenly lose a grant – Campus Review

    In its first 100 days, the Trump administration has terminated more than US$2 billion in federal grants, according to a public source database compiled by the scientific community, and it is proposing additional cuts that would reduce the $47 billion budget of the US National Institutes of Health, also known as the NIH, by nearly half.

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