The American Public Health Association and several researchers are suing the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—plus respective leaders Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—in an effort to reverse and prevent further cancellations of federal research grants.
The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts on April 2 and claims that numerous research grants have been unlawfully terminated.
The cuts impact more than $2.4 billion in grant money, including $1.3 billion in grant funds already spent on projects stopped midstream and $1.1 billion that has been illegally revoked, according to the suit.
The plaintiffs are four distinguished researchers, along with the American Public Health Association—the country’s largest professional organization of public health professionals—and the United Automobile, Aerospace and Agricultural Implement Workers of America.
“Ending these NIH grants wastes taxpayer money and years of hard work to answer the world's most pressing biomedical questions,” plaintiff Brittany Charlton, associate professor at the Harvard Chan School of Public Health, said in an April 2 release. “This is an attack on scientific progress itself.”
The suit is separate from three federal lawsuits that were filed against the NIH in February regarding an agency cap on "indirect costs” for research grants.
The fresh complaint claims that the NIH violated the Administrative Procedure Act by failing to follow proper protocol or provide scientific reasoning for the funding culls. The lawsuit alleges that the agency surpassed its legal authority by ignoring congressional mandates to fund health disparities research and address the underrepresentation of certain groups in medical studies.
The plaintiffs argue that grant terminations must be based on limited grounds spelled out in regulations from the HHS—the NIH’s parent agency.
Additionally, the lawsuit alleges that NIH is violating the Fifth Amendment’s due process protections by canceling grants based on vague criteria.
The agency has pulled funding for science that doesn’t fit into President Donald Trump’s executive orders, including research related to LGBTQ+ health issues and other matters of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), plus work that could potentially benefit researchers in China.
“To exclude from consideration in human medicine the health outcome disparities between one ethnicity or the other, or one sexual orientation or the other, is to strike at the heart of the scientific enterprise,” plaintiff Peter Lurie, M.D., president of nonprofit the Center for Science in the Public Interest, said in the release.
Lurie had consulted for an NIH-funded study examining the impact of access to preventive HIV drugs. The agency terminated the financing for the research because it “no longer effectuates agency priorities," according to the lawsuit. The grant materials had noted the impact preventive HIV meds had on transgender women.
“To tell physicians, clinicians and researchers what they must not study is to tell them what questions not to ask, what answers not to find and which patients not to help,” Lurie said. “This will have devastating consequences for those relying on government progress on HIV, Alzheimer’s, diabetes or other public health challenges, if not reversed by the courts.”
The new court case is far from the first to challenge the federal government’s recent actions regarding research funding.
Shortly after President Donald Trump took office this January, the White House rolled out an initiative designed to slash billions from NIH grants. The cuts centered around "indirect costs,” such as funds for facilities, equipment and administrative expenses.
The Association of American Medical Colleges, alongside the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy, the Association of Schools and Programs of Public Health, the Conference of Boston Teaching Hospitals and the Greater New York Hospital Association, filed suit against the NIH in a Massachusetts federal court at the beginning of February.
Twenty-two states and numerous universities across the country also filed two separate lawsuits against the NIH in the same court.
Later, a federal judged banned efforts to slash grant payments while those lawsuits are ongoing, though the NIH has continued terminating grants across the country.
Previously, the NIH had a yearly budget of nearly $48 billion, making the agency the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.
Separately, about 1,900 scientists—including researchers at every Ivy League university and multiple Nobel Prize winners—have penned a public statement calling on the Trump administration to “cease its wholesale assault on U.S. science.” The scientists warn that “the damage to our nation’s scientific enterprise could take decades to reverse.”
Both the HHS and NIH said the agencies do not comment on pending litigation.