Trump administration asks US Supreme Court to allow NIH diversity-related cuts

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By Andrew Chung

(Reuters) -Donald Trump’s administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday to allow the government to proceed with sweeping cuts to National Institutes of Health grants as part of the Republican president’s crackdown on diversity initiatives.

The Justice Department asked the justices to lift Boston-based U.S. District Judge William Young’s June ruling that halted the plan as a violation of federal law and required the government to reinstate access to the grant funds. The judge acted in a legal challenge by researchers and 16 U.S. states, led by Democratic-governed Massachusetts.

The NIH is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. The cuts are part of Trump’s wide-ranging actions to reshape the U.S. government, slash federal spending and end government support for diversity, equity and inclusion programs and transgender healthcare. 

“The district court’s order directs the NIH to continue paying $783 million in federal grants that are undisputedly counter to the administration’s priorities,” the Justice Department said in the filing.

The administration repeatedly has sought the Supreme Court’s intervention to allow implementation of Trump policies impeded by lower courts. The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has sided with the administration in almost every case that it has been called upon to review since Trump returned to the presidency in January.

In June, dozens of scientists, researchers and other NIH employees signed an open letter criticizing the agency’s actions and spending cuts under Trump that they said politicize research and “harm the health of Americans and people across the globe.”

Young’s 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 “ongoing ideological purge” of projects with a purported connection to gender identity, DEI “or other vague, now-forbidden language.” The other was filed by the states, most of them Democratic-led. 

Young, an appointee of Republican former President Ronald Reagan, invalidated the grant terminations in June. 

The judge wrote that every new administration is entitled to make policy changes but that these must be reasonable and reasonably explained. Instead, according to the judge, the steps taken by Trump administration officials were “breathtakingly arbitrary and capricious,” violating a federal law governing the actions of agencies.

Young criticized administration officials for not offering any definition of DEI while disparaging studies they deemed low-value and unscientific that the officials claimed were used to unlawfully discriminate on the basis of race and other protected characteristics. 

“There is not a shred of evidence supporting any of these statements in the record,” Young wrote.

Many U.S. conservatives contend that DEI policies discriminate against white people. 

The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on July 18 denied the administration’s request to put Young’s decision on hold. 

The administration has argued that the litigation should have been brought in a different judicial body, the Washington-based Court of Federal Claims, which specializes in money damages claims against the U.S. government. 

That reasoning was also the basis for the Supreme Court’s decision in April that let Trump’s administration proceed with millions of dollars of cuts to teacher training grants also targeted under the DEI crackdown. 

(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)