A heavily fractured Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the Trump administration to halt nearly $800 million in research grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health that officials say touch on race and gender issues, but a majority of the court also signaled that the president’s overall effort to crack down on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts may be in trouble.
The court declined to force President Donald Trump to spend the grant money for the moment, but it also didn’t block a lower court ruling that tossed guidance from the administration that was at the heart of the effort to cut the funding. The grantees, the court said, could still seek the money but would have to do so in a different court.
The decision on the grants divided the court 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the court’s three liberals on that point. They would have denied the Trump administration entirely. Four of the court’s conservatives – Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – said they would have sided with Trump entirely.
The case stems from an executive order Trump signed during the first days of his second term, requiring agencies to terminate grants or contracts that “promote gender ideology” or “immoral race- and sex-based preferences under the guise of so-called” DEI efforts.
Officials at the NIH terminated more than 1,700 grants they said dealt with those issues.
Democratic officials in 16 states challenged the grant cancellations along with public health advocacy groups and some affected scientists. Lower courts had sided with the challengers, requiring the administration to turn the flow of money back on temporarily while the case is litigated.
Steve Vladeck, CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said the “key to this ruling” is Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote a brief concurrence with the other conservatives.
“Four justices would’ve ruled against the administration in full; four would have ruled for it in full; and Barrett split the difference – suggesting that the grant recipients are likely to prevail on their challenges to the Trump administration’s anti-DEI directives, but that they can’t get their grant money until and unless they bring their claims in a different federal court,” Vladeck said. “In other words, Trump won this battle, but the grant recipients seem likely to win the war.”
The decision Thursday drew a sharp partial dissent from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who framed the implications as an “abrupt cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to support life-saving biomedical research.”
“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Jackson wrote, referring to the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.” “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.”
Barrett’s concurrence offered the clearest explanation of the court’s decision: The district court that ruled against Trump in the case, she said, likely lacked the jurisdiction to decide on the individual grants at issue in the case. Instead, those suits should have been filed in the Court of Federal Claims. But the district court did have jurisdiction to rule on the underlying DEI policy.
Jackson summed up the implications of that split decision by saying that agencies would not be able to rely on the guidance to cancel grants going forward. Future parties, she said, “might see some benefit” from that outcome.
“But,” she wrote, “the plaintiffs who filed the lawsuit will see none.”
Attorneys for both sides highlighted grants in their briefs to the Supreme Court they said underscored their argument. The Trump administration, for instance, named a grant it said dealt with “Buddhism and HIV stigma in Thailand.” The public health groups said the administration is attempting to cancel a study that deals with “Alzheimer’s Disease and Related Dementia Neuropathologies and Exposures to Traffic Pollution Mixtures.”
The government, the administration told the Supreme Court, is “irreparably harmed when forced to pay out millions of dollars on discretionary grants, with no guarantee of recouping the money.” The lower courts, officials said, were “substituting their own political and policy judgments for those of the executive branch.”
But public health groups said the administration was misstating the case. The problem, they said, was not “a disagreement with the NIH’s policy judgment, but rather with a basic failure to engage in reasoning and explain that reasoning,” as is required by federal law.
On a broader level, the case touched on the question of whether cases resolved on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket carry precedential weight – that is, whether they essentially decide the outcome of similar cases. That’s an issue that’s repeatedly cropped up at the high court, even more so amid a wave of emergency appeals Trump has brought to the court during his second term.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to temporarily freeze millions of dollars in grants to states for addressing teacher shortages. Department of Education officials cancelled the grants for a similar reason: they argued they involved programs that take part in diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
The Supreme Court backed Trump 5-4, with Roberts and the three liberals also dissenting.
The majority relied heavily on that decision. There, the high court allowed the administration to freeze those grants – in part reasoning that the government was unlikely to be able to recoup the money if it ultimately won the case.
“The plaintiffs do not state that they will repay grant money if the government ultimately prevails,” the court wrote in its unsigned order Thursday. “Moreover, the plaintiffs’ contention that they lack the resources to continue their research projects without federal funding is inconsistent with the proposition that they have the resources to make the government whole for money already spent.”
Public health groups and states had argued there were different legal questions at stake. In the NIH matter, US District Judge William Young ruled that the agency had violated federal rulemaking procedures required by the Administrative Procedure Act when the agency canceled the grants. A federal appeals court declined to put that decision on hold.
Young, who was named to the court by President Ronald Reagan, said that after serving as a judge for decades, he had “never seen government racial discrimination like this.”
CNN’s Devan Cole contributed to this report.
This story has been updated with additional details and developments.
