Supreme Court lets Trump administration cut $783 million of research
funding in anti-DEI push
[August 22, 2025]
By LINDSAY WHITEHURST
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration can slash hundreds of
millions of dollars’ worth of research funding in its push to cut
federal diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, the Supreme Court
decided Thursday.
The split court lifted a judge’s order blocking $783 million worth of
cuts made by the National Institutes of Health to align with Republican
President Donald Trump’s priorities.
The court split 5-4 on the decision. Chief Justice John Roberts was
among those who wouldn't have allowed the cuts, along with the court’s
three liberals. The high court did keep the Trump administration's
anti-DEI directive blocked for future funding with a key vote from
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, however.
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 say the decision is a
“significant setback for public health,” but keeping the directive
blocked means the administration can't use it to cut more studies.
The Justice Department, meanwhile, has said funding decisions should not
be “subject to judicial second-guessing” and efforts to promote policies
referred to as DEI can “conceal insidious racial discrimination.”
The lawsuit addresses only part of the estimated $12 billion 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.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer said judges shouldn’t 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.
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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. “All these interventions
should have been unnecessary,” Gorsuch wrote.
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 couldn’t be sent to the claims court.
They said that defunding studies midway through halts research,
ruins data already collected and ultimately harms the country’s
potential for scientific breakthroughs by disrupting scientists’
work in the middle of their careers.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a lengthy dissent in which she
criticized both the outcome and her colleagues' willingness to
continue allowing the administration to use the court's emergency
appeals process.
“This 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,” she wrote, referring to the
fictional game in the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes.”
In June, U.S. District Judge William Young in Massachusetts had
ruled that the cancellations were arbitrary and discriminatory.
“I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” Young,
an appointee of Republican President Ronald Reagan, said at a
hearing. He later added: “Have we no shame.”
An appeals court had left Young’s ruling in place.
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