Brittany Charlton (right), a plaintiff in the lawsuit at Harvard University’s LGBTQ Center of Health Excellence, lost several NIH grants in the Trump administration’s ideological overhaul of the agency.
Suzanne Kreiter/Boston Globe/Getty Images
After the institution terminated more than $2.4 billion in grants, individual university researchers, a public health advocacy organization and a union representing more than 120,000 higher educators are suing the National Institutes of Health, which claims to support “non-science” programs that “no longer” effective institutional priorities.
“The plaintiffs and their members are facing losses in work, staff and income. Patients in the NIH study, led by the plaintiff, face a sudden cancellation of treatment in which they have invested for months without explaining or planning how to mitigate the harm,” according to a complaint filed Wednesday afternoon. “As the scientific advancement of the defendant’s directives will be delayed, treatment will not be discovered, human health will be damaged, and life will be lost. ”
This is the latest set of legal challenges against the Trump administration’s outbreak of executive actions aimed at rooting the enforcement of so-called gender ideology. Diversity, equity and inclusion programs; alleged waste, fraud and abuse of taxpayer funds. Some of these lawsuits have led federal judges to order the injunction and resumption of canceled grants.
But this is one of the first people to directly challenge the cancellation of NIH grants. Expect more legal challenges.
The lawsuit was filed by the American Public Health Association; United Automotive, Aerospace and Agricultural workers, and NIH-funded medical researchers at Harvard University; universities in the University of Michigan and New Mexico; and the Science Center in the Public Interest, all of which lost grants. The American Civil Liberties Union represents the plaintiff.
A NIH spokesman said the agency had no comment on the pending lawsuit.
“The Erosion of Science Freedom”
The plaintiff wants the Massachusetts District Court to declare NIH “illegal” action to restore funds for at least the grants terminated by the plaintiff and to prevent the agency from “under any grants that allegedly no longer affect the agency’s priorities, or to refuse review of the application.”
The lawsuit says most of the terminated grants focus on topics related to vaccine hesitation, climate change, diversify the biomedical research workforce, “focus on the health of the countries” (including China and South Africa) and women, racial minorities, and the LGBTQ+ communities.
One plaintiff is Brittany Charlton, founding director of Harvard University’s LGBTQ Center of Health Excellence. Since President Donald Trump took office in January, he has terminated five NIH grants and launched a crusade and rooted in the so-called gender awareness and diversity, equity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Charlton said in an email Internal Advanced ED Her NIH grant lost nearly $6 million due to the institution’s instructions, meaning “a potential outcome of my academic career.”
But her motivation for signing the lawsuit goes far beyond her own livelihood.
“It’s not only a fight for my career survival, but a position against the erosion of science,” Charlton said.[The grant cancellations set] A worrying precedent, scientific inquiry becomes susceptible to political speech. The focus here is not only academic; it affects the foundations of public health policy and the health of vulnerable communities. ”
Katie Edwards, a social work professor at the University of Michigan, has conducted violence prevention in ethnic minority communities, with six NIH grants this year. The third plaintiff is Nicole Maphis, a first-generation college student and postdoctoral researcher at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, who studied the link between alcohol use and Alzheimer’s disease, no longer considering NIH grants designed to help under-invested researchers become faculty members.
“Arbitrary and Capricious”
The lawsuit argues that NIH has no authority to cancel other grants of agency priorities that the agency claims are no longer valid. This is because the regulatory language cited by NIH that “no longer affects institutional priorities” is intended to justify its termination of a particular grant and will not take effect until October.
Additionally, the cancellation of grants ignores “the explicit requirement of Congress to address health equity and health disparities, including in its research, improves efforts to study gender and sexual minority health, and enhances diversity in biological tradition research professions.”
The lawsuit also said the government violated many aspects of the Administrative Procedure Act, including a provision that prohibited agency litigation from “arbitrary, capricious, abuse of discretion or incompatibility with the law”, when it terminated the grant. It further asserted that the institution usurped Congress’s “exclusive power of federal spending” and violated the Fifth Amendment by providing “vague” reasons for termination of grants, including participation in “transgender people,” “DEIs” or “amorphous interest targets.”
The lawsuit says.
This makes grantees “uncertain, for example, what areas of study they can pursue, what they can focus on the population of the subjects they may argue about to attract grant termination, and what demographics of the study participants must be” and “it is impossible to determine how to reconfigure future research to maintain the scope of the NIH’s latest priority.”
