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A lawsuit challenging sweeping grant cuts at the National Institutes of Health can move forward, a federal judge ruled Monday.
Judge William Young of the District of Massachusetts did grant part of the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss but denied the bulk of the motion, allowing the lawsuit to continue. The lawsuit is one of several challenging grant cuts at federal agencies.
In this case, individual university researchers, a public health advocacy organization and a union sued in early April, arguing that NIH officials broke the law when they canceled $2.4 billion in grants. Specifically, the American Public Health Association and other groups said in the initial complaint that the cancellations violated the Administrative Procedure Act as well as the Fifth Amendment and the separation of powers. The plaintiffs took issue with the cancellation notices, which told grantees that their award “no longer effectuates agency priorities.”
Those letters failed “to provide adequate reasoning explaining how these studies fall below the agency’s standards for scientific research,” the complaint stated. “NIH’s repetition of boilerplate and conclusory language across all the termination letters is not an adequate explanation as to how any specific study fails to meet agency priorities.”
The majority of the terminated grants focused on topics related to vaccine hesitancy, climate change, diversifying the biomedical research workforce, and the health of women, racial minorities and members of the LGBTQ+ community, according to the lawsuit.
The government countered in court filing that its processes followed the law.
Young, a Reagan appointee, found that at this stage of the case, when the facts must be viewed in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs, the government’s arguments don’t pass muster.
“The Public Officials next argue that their explanations were reasoned and reasonable under the circumstances,” he wrote. “At the motion to dismiss stage, the complaint has plausibly alleged otherwise—that the explanations are conclusory and vague. The first examples cite to undefined gender identity issues untethered to the specific terminated grants, with what looks more like a political statement than reasoning about the grants, and without any explanation as to why no corrective action is possible.”
Young did dismiss the plaintiffs’ claims related to the Fifth Amendment and separation of powers in part because the APA claims would provide “an avenue for complete relief.”
