Scholars, groups sue Trump administration over canceled NIH research funding

(CNN) — A public health association and one of the nation’s largest worker unions are suing the Trump administration over the abrupt cancellation of hundreds of research grants, arguing that the moves were arbitrary and capricious and that the federal grant process is supposed to be above politics.

The complaint was filed Wednesday in a Massachusetts court by the American Public Health Association, the United Auto Workers, which also represents research scientists, and several scholars against the US Department of Health and Human Services, the National Institutes of Health, NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

HHS has not responded to CNN’s request for comment on the lawsuit, and the NIH said it doesn’t comment on pending legislation.

NIH grant cancellations have been extremely rare in previous administrations, and the new cancellations will end hundreds of research projects, many of which have been underway for years.

“People who are trying to wrestle with leading causes of morbidity and mortality in this country – indeed, around the world – are finding that their well-intentioned efforts, ratified for its quality by the NIH itself, has suddenly come under a microscope because it offends the sensibilities of a given political interest, and that’s just exactly what the NIH process is supposed to be insulated against,” said one of the plaintiffs, Dr. Peter Lurie, president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

NIH grants canceled

Lurie, a former associate commissioner at the US Food and Drug Administration, was an adviser and consultant on a project whose NIH grant was canceled after about nine months. The NIH said the grant was canceled because the project, which studied the effects of access to PrEP, medication that can prevent HIV infection, “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”

The NIH has canceled hundreds of grants since President Donald Trump’s second presidency began, and the agency said last week that it did so “in accordance with the Presidential Memo ‘Radical Transparency About Wasteful Spending.’ ”

The executive order says that the government spends too much money on “programs, contracts, and grants that do not promote the interests of the American people” and directs all agency heads to let the public know the details of “every terminated program, cancelled contract, terminated grant, or any other discontinued obligation of Federal funds.”

Many of the canceled grants specifically touch on topics that Trump has directed agency heads to de-prioritize through executive orders on “radical and wasteful government DEI programs” and “defending women from gender ideology extremism.” The latter memo declared that there are only two sexes and directed agencies to erase even any mention of and end any program that included people who identify as transgender.

Among the targets of the cancellations are projects on racial or gender differences and diseases that disproportionately affect minority communities, like HIV.

Gone is funding for a project to understand the connection between minority stress and intimate partner violence and another that looked at gender disparities in adolescent mental health. But other canceled grants were not specifically focused on minority communities; one given to Columbia University went toward research on the effectiveness of using wastewater to forecast the severity of Covid-19 outbreaks.

Many of the projects were well under way.

“All those billions of dollars of investment are wasted,” said Lisa Mankofsky, one of the attorneys on the new lawsuit. She represents the Center for Science and the Public Interest, an organization that advocates for evidence-based and nutrition, food safety and health policies, but that group is not a plaintiff in the suit.

The cancellation of projects won’t just hurt researchers, she said, it will halt treatments for patients and could even cost people their lives.

“The topics that are covered under all of these terminations are some of the most pressing issues in public health: cancer, strokes, cardiac health, Alzheimer’s, suicide prevention, Covid vaccine hesitancy, depression. I could go on and on because NIH’s work is so widespread and so important, all those topics are covered,” Mankofsky said.

The NIH is by far the biggest single funder of biomedical research in the world, and its backing is considered the gold standard of research support. Thousands of scientists compete for the funding every year. Grant decisions are made by leading scientific experts in the field at NIH who deliberate over the merit of the work for months.

HHS regulations stipulate that there are only limited circumstances in which a grant can be canceled: for cause, such as when the grant fails to comply with the terms and conditions of the award, or with the consent of the grantee.

“None of those apply here,” Mankofsky said.

Politics, Lurie said, is not supposed to factor into NIH decision-making.

“It’s supposed to be insulated from political interference.
But what is happening now, this is precisely what the process was designed to protect against,” he said.

The complaint argues that the grant cancellations were an arbitrary and capricious act, exceeding statutory authority, and are void because they are vague – “so vague that the recipients of the terminations can’t know what is and what isn’t prohibited,” Mankofsky said.

The complaint also argues that Congress is given exclusive power over spending and lawmaking and that by deciding to pull funding, the executive branch is repealing congressional statues unilaterally.

Pulling minority-focused grants directly contradicts a directive of Congress, Mankofsky said.

With the Minority Health and Health Disparities Research and Education Act of 2000, Congress directed the NIH to conduct and support research with respect to minority health conditions and other populations with health disparities and to give priority to this kind of research.

Part of a wave of lawsuits

It’s the latest in a wave of litigation against the Trump administration. There have been more than 100 lawsuits filed against the administration’s executive actions in the first months of Trump’s second presidency.

On Tuesday, Democratic attorneys general and governors in 23 states and Washington, DC, filed a lawsuit against HHS arguing that the department’s sudden rollback of $12 billion in public health funding was unlawful and harmful.

In March, faculty and national labor unions sued the Trump administration for cutting off $400 million in federal funds for public health research at Columbia University, arguing that these decisions are compelling speech restrictions on campus. The administration said it acted because of what it said was the school’s failure to end antisemitism on a campus that has seen multiple high-profile pro-Palestinian demonstrations in the wake of the war in Gaza.

In February, multiple academic institutions sued HHS and the NIH for capping the amount of reimbursements available in medical research grants, arguing that such a policy exceeds the NIH’s authority. In March, a judge issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting the implementation of NIH plans to slash research overhead payments. In a separate suit, several nonprofits also sued HHS and the NIH over the issue.

Lurie hopes the latest lawsuit will force the Trump administration to continue to fund important public health projects.

“Really, the main thing for people to understand is that this is a fundamental attack on a disfavored group,” he said, “but its implications go beyond even that to include the very edifice of the scientific enterprise itself.”

The NIH is the “beacon on the hill,” he said, where the most prestigious research is conducted and funded.

“To have it undermined in this way is really to give ourselves a black eye to ourselves as a country,” Lurie said.

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