A federal judge in Boston ordered the National Institutes of Health to restore billions of federal research dollars terminated in recent months by the Trump administration.
Judge William Young said the rationale for terminating grants that included studies of racial minorities, gender identity, read as discrimination. He told the NIH to resume funding for those grants and to stop using the criteria that lead to the cancellations.
The order, issued from the bench Monday, was in response to a lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the American Public Health Association, the International Union, United Automobile Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America and several other individual and organizational plaintiffs. The suit claimed the NIH had acted without scientific justification and did not have the authority to end funding directed by Congress.
Young, who was appointed by President Reagan, stressed the need to resume scientific research as soon as possible.
“There was a clear understanding of the importance that science and scientific research has in protecting and promoting the health of people in this country,” said Jessie Rossman, legal director for the ACLU of Massachusetts.
Rossman said attorneys for the Trump administration told the judge they would comply with the order. It wasn’t immediately clear if the administration would appeal the decision.
Brittany Charlton, who founded the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, lost roughly $6 million in NIH funding in March and is a plaintiff in the lawsuit.
“To be sitting in the courtroom and have Judge Young ask, ‘Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?’ ” said Charlton, “It was heartbreaking but also validating.”
The Trump administration has said research like Charlton’s was terminated because it did not align with current federal priorities.
This decision is not expected to apply to all funding cut by the NIH in recent months, but it’s not clear if the ruling might be used to support other lawsuits challenging terminations.
Last month, two doctors from Harvard won a preliminary injunction that means their studies, which mention LGBTQ patients, would be restored to a patient safety website. And a judge has blocked a proposed cap on the portion of research grants that can be used for administrative costs. The NIH has appealed that ruling.
