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.
