request to lift Boston-based<\/a> US District Judge William Young\u2019s 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.<\/p>\nThe 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 \u201cincalculable losses in public health and human life\u201d.<\/p>\n
The NIH is the world\u2019s largest funder of biomedical research. The cuts are part of Trump\u2019s wide-ranging actions to reshape the US government, slash federal spending and end government support for programmes aimed at promoting diversity or \u201cgender ideology\u201d that the administration opposes.<\/p>\n
The administration said Young\u2019s ruling required the NIH to continue paying $783m in grants that run counter to its priorities.<\/p>\n
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has sided with the administration in almost every case\u00a0that it has been called upon to review since Trump returned to the presidency in January.<\/p>\n
After Trump signed executive orders in January targeting DEI and gender ideology, NIH instructed staff to terminate grant funding for \u201clow-value and off-mission\u201d studies deemed related to these concepts, as well as COVID-19 and ways to curb vaccine hesitancy.<\/p>\n
Young\u2019s 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 \u201congoing ideological purge\u201d targeting projects based on \u201cvague, now-forbidden language\u201d. The other was filed by the states, most of them Democratic-led.<\/p>\n
The plaintiffs said the terminated grants included projects on breast cancer, Alzheimer\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
Young, an appointee of former Republican President Ronald Reagan, invalidated the grant terminations in June. In a written ruling, the judge said they were \u201cbreathtakingly arbitrary and capricious\u201d, violating a federal law governing the actions of agencies.<\/p>\n
During a June hearing in the case, Young rebuked the administration for what he called a \u201cdarker aspect\u201d to the case that the cuts represent \u201cracial discrimination and discrimination against America\u2019s LGBTQ community\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable,\u201d the judge said.<\/p>\n
Young also said the cuts were designed to stop research that bears on the health of the LGBTQ community. \u201cThat\u2019s appalling,\u201d the judge said.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
That reasoning was also the basis for the Supreme Court\u2019s decision in April that let Trump\u2019s administration proceed with millions of dollars<\/a> of cuts to teacher training grants, also targeted under the DEI crackdown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SCOTUS decision impacts DEI programmes that include breast cancer research and HIV prevention. The highest court in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":88321,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13444,1376,43,84,44,41,39,42,40,772,1690],"class_list":{"0":"post-88320","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-courts","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-headlines","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-top-news","14":"tag-top-stories","15":"tag-topnews","16":"tag-topstories","17":"tag-united-states","18":"tag-us-canada"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88320","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88320"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88320\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88320"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88320"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88320"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}