In a fractured ruling, the Supreme Court on Thursday ruled by a 5-to-4 vote that the Trump administration could for now cancel more than $780 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health that the government said had been intended to explore topics like diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, “gender ideology” and vaccine hesitancy.
But a different five-justice majority let stand for now a lower court’s ruling that the administration’s underlying policy directing the cuts was probably unlawful and should be put on hold.
Only Justice Amy Coney Barrett was in both majorities.
The court’s order is not the last word, and the case will proceed in lower courts. The upshot of the scrambled ruling, subject to ongoing litigation, appears to be that grants already canceled will not be immediately reinstated but that recipients may be able to sue in a specialized court. Further cancellations may be barred.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Barrett wrote that challenges to individual grant terminations had probably been filed in the wrong court. But she said the challenge to the policy guidance had been filed in the correct court.
Still, she added, “whether claims about the guidance in this case will succeed is another question” but the lower court judge’s ruling could remain in place for now.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and the court’s three liberal members — Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — would have blocked the policy and also restored the funding. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh would have allowed the Trump policy and the cuts to be implemented.
The mixed result was a break from the administration’s recent winning streak at the Supreme Court.
After the N.I.H. sent out boilerplate notices terminating thousands of grants, research and advocacy groups, a union, individual researchers and 16 states sued, saying the moves were arbitrary and capricious.
The forbidden research topics, the challengers said, were ill-defined and the policy of canceling grants inconsistently applied. The practical impact, they added, was devastating.
“To take just one example,” lawyers for the states told the justices, “defendants’ terminations forced the University of Massachusetts’ medical school to lay off or furlough 209 employees and to cut the incoming fall 2025 graduate class by 86 percent, from 70 students to 10.”
Judge William G. Young of the Federal District Court of Massachusetts ruled for the challengers in July, saying that the administration had justified its actions with “sparse pseudo-reasoning and wholly unsupported statements.”
For example, Judge Young, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, said there was “not a shred of evidence” to support the administration’s position that D.E.I. studies are “often used in support of unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics.”
A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Boston, refused to pause Judge Young’s ruling while it considered the government’s appeal. Writing for the panel, Judge Julie Rikelman, who was appointed by President Joseph R. Biden Jr., said it appeared that the terminations would set back lifesaving research by years, if not decades.
The case was similar to one from April in which the Supreme Court allowed the administration to temporarily suspend $65 million in teacher-training grants, but the N.I.H. case involves far more money. The April vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice Roberts dissenting along with the three-member liberal bloc.
Since then, the administration has prevailed in a large majority of its roughly 20 emergency applications arising from its blitz of executive orders, often with only liberal justices issuing public dissents.
In its emergency application in the N.I.H. case, the government said that the case was legally identical to the April case and that federal trial judges’ defiance of that ruling “has grown to epidemic proportions.”
The challengers said the two cases were different, partly because the earlier one concerned individual contracts rather than an overall policy. That was the issue that divided the justices.
In a page-long partial dissent, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the policy guidance and its consequences were legally inseparable and so the funding should be restored. Judge Young, the chief justice wrote, was not required to split the case into two parts.
The court’s three liberal members joined his opinion.
Justice Jackson added her own 16-page opinion writing only for herself. She drew on the comic strip “Calvin and Hobbes,” which features the game of Calvinball.
“This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Justice Jackson wrote. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.”
The court’s ruling, she wrote, will halt the forward march of science.
“Yearslong studies will lose validity,” she wrote. “Animal subjects will be euthanized. Lifesaving medication trials will be abandoned. Countless researchers will lose their jobs. And community health clinics will close.”
In his own partial dissent, Justice Gorsuch criticized Judge Young for not following the Supreme Court’s April ruling. “If the district court’s failure to abide by” the earlier decision “were a one-off, perhaps it would not be worth writing to address it,” Justice Gorsuch wrote.
But he said recent district court rulings on immigration and removal of leaders of independent agencies were also instances of what he said was judicial defiance.