“Have we no shame?”: Trump’s NIH grant cuts appallingly illegal, judge rules
“Where’s the support for that?” Young asked. “I see no evidence of that.”
Meanwhile, a lawyer representing one of the plaintiffs suing to block the grants, Kenneth Parreno, seemingly successfully argued that canceling grants related to race or transgender health were part of “a slapdash, harried effort to rubber stamp an ideological purge.” At the trial, Young noted that much of the information about the grant cancellations was only available due to the independent efforts of academics behind a project called Grant Watch, which was launched to crowdsource the monumental task of tracking the cuts.
According to Young, he felt “hesitant to draw this conclusion” but ultimately had “an unflinching obligation to draw it.”
Rebuking the cuts and ordering hundreds of grants restored, Young said “it is palpably clear that these directives and the set of terminated grants here also are designed to frustrate, to stop, research that may bear on the health—we’re talking about health here, the health of Americans, of our LGBTQ community. That’s appalling.
“You are bearing down on people of color because of their color,” Young said. “The Constitution will not permit that… Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”
Young also signaled that he may restore even more grants, noting that the DOJ “made virtually no effort to push back on claims that the cuts were discriminatory,” Politico reported.
White House attacks judge
Andrew Nixon, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, told NYT that in spite of the ruling, the agency “stands by its decision to end funding for research that prioritized ideological agendas.” He claimed HHS is exploring a potential appeal, which seems likely given the White House’s immediate attacks on Young’s ruling. Politico noted that Trump considers his executive orders to be “unreviewable by the courts” due to his supposedly “broad latitude to set priorities and pause funding for programs that no longer align.”
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