Us Supreme Court Allows Nih to Cut $2b in Research Grants

Posted4 months agoActive4 months ago

rntn

82 points

13 comments

nature.comResearchstory

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Us Supreme CourtNih Research GrantsScience FundingGovernment Priorities

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Us Supreme Court

Nih Research Grants

Science Funding

Government Priorities

The US Supreme Court allowed the NIH to cut $2B in research grants, sparking debate about the court's role in science funding and government priorities.

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Discussion (13 comments)

Showing 13 comments

amir734jj

4 months ago

3 replies

I think we will feel the impact of this in ~10 years. Not good.

jmclnx

4 months ago

So will China, but in a good way as research the US funded heads to mainland China. Xi must be dancing for joy, in maybe 10 to 20 years, China will be by far a big economic powerhouse, eclipsing the US on its way to the top. Funny thing is, the US is doing this all on its own.

This seems to me a repeat of 1930s Germany, where many scientists left Nazi Germany for the US. That turned the US into an R&D powerhouse. By then, no one will care what the US does, it will be totally ignored.

gosub100

4 months ago

They shouldn't have included racist policies in the first place.

slipperydippery

4 months ago

I think we’re going to be dealing with so many things in ten years that this’ll hardly even register.

matthewdgreen

4 months ago

2 replies

As is typical in this Court, the judges don't actually render a decision on the matter at hand, but instead engage in a sort of arbitrary process of process. "It just needs to be heard in a different court, start over there and come back to us in a few years when all the research specimens have been destroyed and the case is moot." The actual result is that the administration can just do whatever it wants, since the Court can always develop a process reason to avoid ruling on any case, regardless of the merits.

Even the conservative judges disagree on which court this should be heard in, just that it can't be ruled on now. It's amazing how easily it is to wipe out the redress of the Court system.

votepaunchy

4 months ago

What is the alternative? Tie up the administration in court for four years and eviscerate democracy? The constitution mandates speedy trials.

jfengel

4 months ago

My favorite of those is "standing". You take a decade working through the court system, and they all rule in your favor. Then it reaches the top level and they decide, oops, you're not actually the one allowed to sue. And they're not gonna tell you who is; you just have to start over and wait for them to throw it out again.

whatever1

4 months ago

2 replies

It is fine for the NIH to cut completely the research grants if the government that was elected by the people decides that the country has other priorities.

What is not fine is having a censorship committee, that has obviously no idea about the field, to be deciding based on their vibes whether a proposal should be funded.

I find it insane that in 2025, in the USA, Medical researchers have to scrub their science manuscripts for potentially offending keywords.

xhkkffbf

4 months ago

1 reply

How many of the canceled grants are caused by misread phrases like "cellular diversity" and how many were grants from programs where the word "diversity" meant only people with the right skin color should bother applying?

I realize that people are scrubbing certain words from their grants, but how real is the danger that the NIH won't be smart enough to tell the difference?

stevenbedrick

4 months ago

Two points. First, the danger is very real, as the specific administrative mechanism for those final determinations involves political appointees outside of the regular scientific or program review processes, so who knows what they will or won’t understand or what sort of priorities they’ll be working off of.

Second, the programs you’re referring to (“diversity” meaning only people with the right skin color etc.) used a very clear and well-defined model of “under-represented minority” that (in addition to members of this or that minority racial or ethnic group) included women, people from rural zip codes, people who were the first in their families to go to college, people who grew up on free/reduced lunch, and a bunch of other categories that have long been known to be under-represented in science. This definition has been around for decades and there’s been a ton of research about the importance and efficacy of these kinds of programs, some of which are training programs to try and diversify the incoming pipeline of scientists, and some of which were additional funding pools to try and address the very, very, very well-documented gap in early career funding awarded to URM scientists. Characterizing it as just being about skin color is simply inaccurate.

Some of the other “DEI” research that has been terminated consists of projects looking at health issues that are specific to certain populations; the NIH has officially said that health disparities research is still allowed but we are all scratching our heads trying to figure out how to write grants for it that don’t run afoul of the current “rules” which are frankly nonsensical and very “vibe” based so it’s hard to know what will and what won’t be allowed. Almost like they don’t want us to bother trying…

stevenbedrick

4 months ago

Totally agreed, but I will just add, to your first point, it’s fine for priorities to change, but we do also have well-established statutes that define how changes in administrative rules are supposed to be implemented (eg the Administrative Procedures Act), and at least some of the lawsuits about grant termination have argued that those rules have been being ignored or outright turned inside-out. The district court judge’s written decision in the APHA v NIH case was quite detailed in his explanation of the many, many, many ways that the APA was grossly violated. So yes, priorities are allowed to change, but we have a system in place to manage that; otherwise we are, as Justice Jackson put it this week, playing Calvinball which IMHO is no way to run a country. At a micro level, it’s really painful to spend months writing a grant, more months waiting for it to come up for review, and then at the last second have it get administratively bounced because of new “rules” that didn’t exist when the grant was written or submitted (as happened to me earlier this year).

You are of course correct that it’s utterly bananas that in 225 we are wasting our time trying to guess which words shouldn’t be used in grant applications, and that our colleagues at the CDC and NIH are having to do the same for their papers.

mandeepj

4 months ago

Seems like US Supreme Court has become a majority group of Yes (Wo)men

KumaBear

4 months ago

I remember a time when the Supreme Court only reviewed constitutional questions. Not bureaucracy.

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ID: 45004235Type: storyLast synced: 11/20/2025, 4:32:26 PM

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