The US Supreme Court has permitted the Trump administration to proceed with slashing $783 million in research grants awarded by the national institutes of health (NIH), lifting a lower court’s block on the move. The grants were originally aligned with federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, reported news agency AP. The 5-4 decision marks a significant development in a broader legal battle over federal funding priorities. While allowing the past cuts to stand, the apex court has continued to block the administration’s guidance on future research grants.The conservative majority, including Justice Neil Gorsuch, found that the dispute over the NIH cuts belonged in the federal claims court, in line with an earlier ruling on teacher-training programme funding. “All these interventions should have been unnecessary,” Gorsuch noted in his opinion, as quoted by the agency.Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s three liberal justices in dissent. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a detailed dissent, wrote: “A half paragraph of reasoning (issued without full briefing or any oral argument) thus suffices here to partially sustain the government’s abrupt cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to support life-saving biomedical research.”The cuts are part of an estimated $12 billion worth of NIH research funding halted under the Trump administration’s review of federal DEI spending. Sixteen Democratic attorneys general and several public-health advocacy groups, who challenged the move, argued that such cancellations disrupt scientific research and threaten public health.“Halting studies midway can also ruin the data already collected and ultimately harm the country’s potential for scientific breakthroughs by disrupting scientists’ work in the middle of their careers,” the plaintiffs argued, according to the report.Earlier in June, US district judge William Young had blocked the funding cuts, calling them “arbitrary and discriminatory.” At a hearing, he remarked: “I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this… Have we no shame.”The Trump administration, represented by solicitor general D John Sauer, maintained that funding decisions are executive functions and should not be “subject to judicial second-guessing,” arguing that DEI programmes can “conceal insidious racial discrimination.”The case continues to unfold in lower courts even as the Supreme Court’s interim order enables the administration to move ahead with rolling back funding for multiple research programmes.
