The matter of canceling the grants unfolded relatively quickly. By June, a district court judge said the federal policy “constitutes racial discrimination” and issued a preliminary order this would result in the restoration of all canceled grants. In his written opinion, Judge William Young noted that the government issued its guidelines blocking support for DEI without even bothering to define what DEI is, making the entire policy arbitrary and capricious and thus violating the Administrative Procedure Act. He canceled the policyand ordered that funding be restored.
His decision eventually reached the Supreme Court, which made a decision in which the fragmented majority agreed on only one issue: Judge Young's circuit court was the wrong place to discuss issues related to money provided by the government. Thus, the recovery of money from canceled grants will have to be considered in a separate case brought in a different court.
However, crucially, this left another part of the solution untouched. Young's determination that government actions that are anti-DEI, anti-climate, anti-etc. the policy was illegal and thus invalid.
Restoring reviews
This has serious implications for the second part of the original lawsuit, which concerns grants that have not yet been funded and are blocked from any consideration by Trump administration policies. Since this policy was rescinded, there was no excuse for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) not to review grants when they were submitted. But in the meantime, the deadlines have expired, the money has been spent, and in some cases the people who applied for the grants have already left the “new investigator” category under which they applied.
The proposed settlement essentially nullifies all of that; blocked grants will be assessed for funding as if they were still in early 2025. “Defendants stipulate and agree that the end of Federal Fiscal Year 2025 shall not prevent Defendants from considering and/or awarding any applications,” it states. Even if the Notice of Funding Opportunity has since been withdrawn, grant applications will be sent for peer review.
