The federal judge said the NIH violated federal law by arbitrarily canceling more than $1 billion in research grants because of their perceived connection to DEI initiatives.
A federal judge in Boston said Monday the termination of National Institutes of Health grants for research on diversity-related topics by the Trump administration was “void and illegal” and accused the government of discriminating against racial minorities and LGBTQ people.
U.S. District Judge William Young said during a nonjury trial that the NIH violated federal law by arbitrarily canceling more than $1 billion in research grants because of their perceived connection to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Young said he was reinstating grants that had been awarded to organizations and Democratic-led states that sued over the terminations. And he indicated that he could issue a more sweeping decision as the case proceeds.
I am glad to see this happening. Unfortunately a lot of the damage is already done, though - staff have been lost and may not be easily replaced, studies have been interrupted at critical points and cannot simply be resumed from where they left off, etc. At least this pushback from the courts may reduce the likelihood of further such cuts.
Yeah there was just recently a top post on lemmy on whether or not people believe that Trump ignoring federal judges is illegal. I haven’t seen evidence that his administration is following through on any of these rulings, rather that it’s just dragging its feet until there’s no more judges to make the rulings.
What he’ll do is appeal the ruling and get the appeals court to put this judges ruling on hold. Then if the appeals court upholds the first judges decision, he’ll appeal to the supreme court. And even if SCOTUS agrees with the initial ruling, weeks or months will have passed and many, if not most ongoing experiments will have been disrupted to the point of being valueless.
I’m sure all those researchers who lost their jobs are happy now that they (temporarily) won the moral victory, but not one that matters to them.
