Grant funding

Deeply divided Supreme Court lets NIH grant terminations continue

doge, Grant funding, NIH, Policy, Science, science funding, Supreme Court / Shannon Garcia / August 22, 2025

The dissents

The primary dissent was written by Chief Justice Roberts, and joined in part by the three Democratic appointees, Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor. It is a grand total of one paragraph and can be distilled down to a single sentence: “If the District Court had jurisdiction to vacate the directives, it also had jurisdiction to vacate the ‘Resulting Grant Terminations.’”

Jackson, however, chose to write a separate and far more detailed argument against the decision, mostly focusing on the fact that it’s not simply a matter of abstract law; it has real-world consequences.

She notes that existing law prevents plaintiffs from suing in the Court of Federal Claims while the facts are under dispute in other courts (something acknowledged by Barrett). That would mean that, as here, any plaintiffs would have to have the policy declared illegal first in the District Court, and only after that was fully resolved could they turn to the Federal Claims Court to try to restore their grants. That’s a process that could take years. In the meantime, the scientists would be out of funding, with dire consequences.

Yearslong studies will lose validity. Animal subjects will be euthanized. Life-saving medication trials will be abandoned. Countless researchers will lose their jobs. And community health clinics will close.

Jackson also had little interest in hearing that the government would be harmed by paying out the grants in the meantime. “For the Government, the incremental expenditure of money is at stake,” she wrote. “For the plaintiffs and the public, scientific progress itself hangs in the balance along with the lives that progress saves.”

With this decision, of course, it no longer hangs in the balance. There’s a possibility that the District Court’s ruling that the government’s policy was arbitrary and capricious will ultimately prevail; it’s not clear, because Barrett says she hasn’t even seen the government make arguments there, and Roberts only wrote regarding the venue issues. In the meantime, even with the policy stayed, it’s unlikely that anyone will focus grant proposals on the disfavored subjects, given that the policy might be reinstated at any moment.

And even if that ruling is upheld, it will likely take years to get there, and only then could a separate case be started to restore the funding. Any labs that had been using those grants will have long since moved on, and the people working on those projects scattered.

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22 states sue to block new NIH funding policy—court puts it on hold

Regardless of what else they might be doing, the indirect costs pay for various critical campus services, including at research hospitals. Suddenly having that amount slashed would create a major budgetary shortfall that will be hard to cover without shutting programs down.

The resulting damage to research campuses in their states was one of the harms cited by the states that joined the suit as part of their effort to establish standing. The other was the harm caused by the general slowdown in biomedical research that the policy will trigger, which the states argue will delay the availability of treatments for their citizens.

The states taking part include most of those that were won by Kamala Harris in 2024, as well as states that voted for Trump but currently have Democratic governors and attorneys general: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Notably, the suit only seeks relief from the altered NIH policy for institutions located in those states; they’re essentially leaving states controlled by Republicans to suffer the damages caused by the new policy.

Allegations and backup allegations

The states allege that the new NIH policy, by applying to all grants in progress, is equivalent to rewriting a contract. It cites an earlier legal decision that determined that “Once the [Notice of Award] is signed or money is drawn, the [Notice of Award] and the grant terms are binding on the grantee and the government.” Beyond that, the states argue the policy violates two separate pieces of legislation.

The first is the Administrative Procedures Act, which describes the processes that agencies need to follow when they formulate formal rules to translate legislation into implementations. Among other things, this prevents agencies from formulating rules that are “arbitrary and capricious.” It argues that, by including audits and negotiations in the process of setting them, the current individualized indirect rates are anything but.

By contrast, the states argue, there’s no significant foundation for the 15 percent indirect rate. “The Rate Change Notice is arbitrary and capricious in, among other ways, its failure to articulate the bases for the categorical rate cap of 15 percent,” the suit alleges, “its failure to consider the grant recipients’ reliance on their negotiated rates, and its disregard for the factual findings that formed the bases for the currently operative negotiated indirect cost rates.”