\n<\/p>\n
The National Institutes of Health is deciding, per court agreements, whether to award or deny droves of grant applications that the agency previously either rejected or shelved. This funding was stalled last year amid the Trump administration\u2019s blunt moves to restrict research into certain disfavored topics, such as diversity, equity and inclusion\u2014though researchers and state attorneys general said officials shot down a greater range of projects, including ones that could save lives. <\/p>\n
The NIH\u2019s agreements, laid out in court filings in two ongoing lawsuits, are already bearing fruit. A spokesperson for the Massachusetts attorney general\u2019s office, which is leading one of the cases, said the agreement in that suit promises decisions on more than 5,000 grants nationally. On Dec.\u00a029, the date of the agreement, the NIH issued 528 grant decisions, 499 of which were approvals, the spokesperson said.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union, which is leading the other case, said the agreement in that case involves about 400 grants. He said the NIH awarded at least 135 out of 146 applications in a batch of decisions on Dec.\u00a029.<\/p>\n
The filings set a series of dates by which the NIH agreed to decide on awarding or denying other types of grants. The last deadline is July\u00a031.<\/p>\n
The agreements are another example of the Trump administration reversing many of its sweeping cuts to research funding in response to litigation. Researchers and organizations filed suit after suit last year after the NIH and other federal funding agencies abruptly terminated previously awarded grants and sat on applications for new ones. <\/p>\n
In a news release, the ACLU said the grants that the NIH will now decide on \u201caddress urgent public health issues, including HIV prevention, Alzheimer\u2019s disease, LGBTQ+ health, and sexual violence.\u201d ACLU of Massachusetts legal director Jessie Rossman said in the release that the NIH\u2019s \u201cunprecedented\u201d and \u201cunlawful\u201d actions put \u201cmany scientists\u2019 careers in limbo, including hundreds of members of the American Public Health Association and the UAW union.\u201d <\/p>\n
ACLU lawyers are among the attorneys representing those groups, Ibis Reproductive Health and individual researchers in a suit they filed in April against the NIH and the larger Health and Human Services Department for stalling and rejecting grant funding. Democratic state attorneys general filed a similar suit in the same court, the U.S. District Court of Massachusetts. <\/p>\n
The agencies agreed to decide these grant applications in exchange for the plaintiffs dismissing some of their claims. The agencies didn\u2019t admit wrongdoing.<\/p>\n
In a news release, the Massachusetts attorney general\u2019s office said the Trump administration \u201cindefinitely withheld issuing final decisions on applications that had already received approval from the relevant review panels,\u201d leaving the states that sued \u201cawaiting decisions on billions of dollars.\u201d <\/p>\n
The release said that, for example, when the suit was filed in April, the University of Massachusetts \u201chad 353 applications for NIH funding whose review had been delayed, signifying millions in potential grant funding that would aid in lifesaving medical research.\u201d Massachusetts attorney general Andrea Joy Campbell said in a statement that \u201clifesaving studies related to Alzheimer\u2019s disease, cancer, and other devastating illnesses were frozen indefinitely\u2014stealing hope from countless families across the country and putting lives at risk.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s unclear how much money the NIH may dole out in total. An HHS spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed <\/em>that the \u201cNIH cannot comment on the status of individual grant applications or deliberations.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe agency remains committed to supporting rigorous, evidence-based research that advances the health of all Americans,\u201d the spokesperson said. HHS and the NIH didn\u2019t provide interviews or further comment. <\/p>\n Meanwhile, a legal fight continues over grants that the NIH previously approved but later canceled. <\/p>\n In June, in these same two cases, U.S. District Judge William Young ordered the NIH to restore grants the agency had awarded but then\u2014after Trump retook the White House\u2014terminated midgrant. <\/p>\n Young, a Reagan appointee, criticized the federal government for not formally defining DEI, despite using that term to justify terminating grants. He said at a hearing that he\u2019d \u201cnever seen racial discrimination by the government like this\u201d during his four decades as a federal judge. <\/p>\n But, two months later, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-to-4 preliminary decision, stayed Young\u2019s ruling ordering restoration of the grants. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump appointee, wrote for the majority that Young \u201clikely lacked jurisdiction to hear challenges to the grant terminations, which belong in the Court of Federal Claims.\u201d However, STAT <\/em>reported that the NIH had restored more than 2,000 terminated grants following Young\u2019s ruling, and it didn\u2019t reverse course after the Supreme Court decision. <\/p>\n That question of whether researchers with canceled grants must ultimately try their luck before the Court of Federal Claims is now before the U.S. First Circuit Court of Appeals. There\u2019s a hearing Tuesday in that matter. <\/p>\n Questions linger about when the grant fight will really end. In a video interview with journalist Paul Thacker\u2014released Wednesday and previously reported on by STAT<\/em>\u2014NIH director Jay Bhattacharya said that, despite the grant restorations, any grants dealing with DEI that come up for renewal this year won\u2019t be funded. Bhattacharya distinguished between cutting a grant and not renewing it. <\/p>\n He said that, \u201cas best I can understand the legal aspects,\u201d the courts have said his agency can\u2019t cut restored grants. \u201cBut, when it comes to renewal, those grants no longer meet NIH priorities\u00a0\u2026 so when they come up for renewal over the course of the year, we won\u2019t renew them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Bhattacharya said the NIH\u2019s DEI-related work \u201cdid not actually have any chance of improving the health of minority populations.\u201d He said, \u201cI think that the shift away from DEI is of a piece with the rest of what we\u2019re trying to do at the NIH, which is to do research that actually makes the lives of people better.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The National Institutes of Health is deciding, per court agreements, whether to award or deny droves of grant applications that the agency previously either rejected or shelved. This funding was stalled last year amid the Trump administration\u2019s blunt moves to restrict research into certain disfavored topics, such as diversity, equity and inclusion\u2014though researchers and state<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40110,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[21620,5028,915,10285,4639,405,11270],"class_list":{"0":"post-40109","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-education","8":"tag-100s","9":"tag-applications","10":"tag-approves","11":"tag-denied","12":"tag-grant","13":"tag-nih","14":"tag-shelved"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40109\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Lingering Questions <\/h2>\n