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In mid-June, a federal judge issued a stinging rebuke to the Trump administration, declaring that its decision to cancel the funding for many grants issued by the National Institutes of Health was illegal, and suggesting that the policy was likely animated by racism. But the detailed reasoning behind his decision wasn't released at the time. The written portion of the decision was finally issued on Wednesday, and it has a number of notable features.
For starters, it's more limited in scope due to a pair of Supreme Court decisions that were issued in the intervening weeks. As a consequence, far fewer grants will see their funding restored. Regardless, the court continues to find that the government's actions were arbitrary and capricious, in part because the government never bothered to define the problems that would get a grant canceled. As a result, officials within the NIH simply canceled lists of grants they received from DOGE without bothering to examine their scientific merit, and then struggled to retroactively describe a policy that justified the actions afterward—a process that led several of them to resign.
A more limited verdict
The issue before Judge William Young of the District of Massachusetts was whether the government had followed the law in terminating grants funded by the National Institutes of Health. After a short trial, Young issued a verbal ruling that the government hadn't, and that he had concluded that its actions were the product of "racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ. community." But the details of his decisions and the evidence that motivated them had to wait for a written ruling, which is now available.
In the meantime, however, the Supreme Court had shifted the ground on a couple of issues. For example, while Young still feels that policy decisions were motivated by discrimination against the LGBTQ community, the United States v. Skrmetti decision limits what he can do about it. Young writes that the decision "leads this Court to conclude that, while here there is federal government discrimination based on a person’s status, not all discrimination is pejorative."
Separately, Trump v. Casa blocked the use of a national injunction against illegal activity. So, while the government's actions have been determined to be illegal, Young can only protect the people who were parties to this suit. Anyone who lost a grant but wasn't a member of any of the parties involved, or based in any of the states that sued, remains on their own.
Those issues aside, the ruling largely focuses on whether the termination of grants violates the Administrative Procedures Act, which governs how the executive branch handles decision- and rule-making. Specifically, it requires that any decisions of this sort cannot be "arbitrary and capricious." And, Young concludes that the government hasn't cleared that bar.
Arbitrary and capricious
The grant cancellations, Young concludes, "Arise from the NIH’s newly minted war against undefined concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion and gender identity, that has expanded to include vaccine hesitancy, COVID, influencing public opinion and climate change." The "undefined" aspect plays a key part in his reasoning. Referring to DEI, he writes, "No one has ever defined it to this Court—and this Court has asked multiple times." It's not defined in Trump's executive order that launched the "newly minted war," and Young found that administrators within the NIH issued multiple documents that attempted to define it, not all of which were consistent with each other, and in some cases seemed to use circular reasoning.
He also noted that the officials who sent these memos had a tendency to resign shortly afterward, writing, "it is not lost on the Court that oftentimes people vote with their feet."
As a result, the NIH staff had no solid guidance for determining whether a given grant violated the new anti-DEI policy, or how that might be weighed against the scientific merit of the grant. So, how were they to identify which grants needed to be terminated? The evidence revealed at trial indicates that they didn't need to make those decisions; DOGE made them for the NIH. In one case, an NIH official approved a list of grants to terminate received from DOGE only two minutes after it showed up in his inbox.
"There is no reasoned decision-making at all with respect to the NIH’s 'abruptness' in the 'robotic rollout' of this grant-termination action," Young concludes. "Based upon a fair preponderance of the evidence and on the sparse administrative record, the Court finds and rules that HHS and, in turn, NIH, are being force-fed unworkable 'policy' supported with sparse pseudo-reasoning, and wholly unsupported statements."
Young also noted that the termination of grants to Columbia University was equally arbitrary. "How the scientific and research activities had any connection with unrest issues on Columbia’s campus is conspicuously never explained," Young noted. "The record evidence certainly reveals none."
A small win against a larger loss
Given all that, it's little surprise that the ruling declares the grant terminations to be arbitrary and capricious. "The Public Officials [at the NIH] in their haste to appease the Executive, simply moved too fast and broke things," Young concluded, "including the law." That provides the legal reasoning behind his earlier decision to restore the cancelled grants, although as noted, this has now been limited to only those grants held by researchers who are covered by one of the organizations or governments that filed the suit.
But Young also appears to lament the fact that he had to intervene here, writing:
The American people have enjoyed a historical norm of a largely apolitical scientific research agency supporting research in an elegant, merit-based approach that benefits everyone. That historical norm changed on January 20, 2025. The new Administration began weaponizing what should not be weaponized—the health of all Americans through its abuse of HHS and the NIH systems, creating chaos and promoting an unreasonable an unreasoned agenda of blacklisting certain topics, that on this Administrative Record, has absolutely nothing to do with the promotion of science or research.
So, while the decision restores money to individual research programs, it does nothing to reverse the larger damage caused by the politicization of funding decisions.
