Trump administration<\/a> can slash hundreds of millions of dollars\u2019 worth of research funding in its push to cut federal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the supreme court decided on Thursday.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe split court lifted a judge\u2019s order blocking $783m worth of cuts made by the National Institutes of Health to align with Donald Trump\u2019s priorities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The court split 5-4 on the decision. Chief Justice John Roberts was among those who would not have allowed the cuts, along with the court\u2019s three liberal justices. The high court did keep the Trump administration anti-DEI guidance on future funding blocked with a key vote from Justice Amy Coney Barrett, however.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The decision marks the latest supreme court win for Trump and allows the administration to forge ahead with canceling hundreds of grants while the lawsuit continues to unfold. The plaintiffs, including states and public-health advocacy groups, have argued that the cuts will inflict \u201cincalculable losses in public health and human life\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The justice department, meanwhile, has said funding decisions should not be \u201csubject to judicial second-guessing\u201d and efforts to promote policies referred to as DEI can \u201cconceal insidious racial discrimination\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The lawsuit addresses only part of the estimated $12bn of NIH research projects that have been cut, but in its emergency appeal, the Trump administration also took aim at nearly two dozen other times judges have stood in the way of its funding cuts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Solicitor general D John Sauer said judges shouldn\u2019t be considering those cases under an earlier supreme court decision that cleared the way for teacher-training program cuts that the administration also linked to DEI. He says they should go to federal claims court instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Five conservative justices agreed, and Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a short opinion in which he criticized lower-court judges for not adhering to earlier high court orders. \u201cAll these interventions should have been unnecessary,\u201d Gorsuch wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The plaintiffs, 16 Democratic state attorneys general and public-health advocacy groups had unsuccessfully argued that research grants are fundamentally different from the teacher-training contracts and could not be sent to claims court.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They said that defunding studies midway though halts research, ruins data already collected and ultimately harms the country\u2019s potential for scientific breakthroughs by disrupting scientists\u2019 work in the middle of their careers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a lengthy dissent in which she criticized both the outcome and her colleagues\u2019 willingness to continue allowing the administration to use the court\u2019s emergency appeals process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: there are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins,\u201d she wrote, referring to the fictional game in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In June, US district judge William Young in Massachusetts had ruled that the cancellations were arbitrary and discriminatory. \u201cI\u2019ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,\u201d Young, an appointee of Republican president Ronald Reagan, said at a hearing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He later added: \u201cHave we no shame?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An appeals court had left Young\u2019s ruling in place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
theguardian<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Court, in 5-4 split, lifts judge\u2019s order blocking $783m in cuts made by NIH to align with president\u2019s priorities The Trump administration can slash hundreds of millions of dollars\u2019 worth of research funding in its push to cut federal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the supreme court decided on Thursday. The split court lifted a judge\u2019s order […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":46426,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[1723,2280,1230],"class_list":["post-46425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-court","tag-supreme","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46425"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46428,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46425\/revisions\/46428"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/46426"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ustower.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}