WASHINGTON – The Trump administration can cancel $783 million in health research funding it says promotes diversity, equity and inclusion, the Supreme Court said Aug. 21 in its latest ruling that allows the president to move forward with policy changes being challenged in court.

Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s three liberals said they would have kept the cuts on hold.

The court kept on hold the government’s guidance that it would not approve future funding related to DEI objectives, gender identity or COVID-19. But a majority agreed with the administration that the dispute over cuts to existing grants belonged in a different court.

The high court's ruling comes after a federal judge in Massachusetts found that the administration’s termination of National Institutes of Health grants was "breathtakingly arbitrary and capricious” and supported with “sparse pseudo-reasoning.”

U.S. District Judge William Young, who was appointed to the bench by Republican President Ronald Reagan, also said the grant cancellations represented “racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community.”

“I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination is so palpable,” Young said during a June hearing.

But the Trump administration said the judge did not have the authority to weigh in. Lawyers for the administration argued that the challenges from researchers, the American Public Health Association and states led by Democrats must be brought in a different court that handles government contract disputes.

The Justice Department lawyers said the Massachusetts judge should have known that, based on the Supreme Court’s April order that permitted the Education Department to halt millions of dollars in teacher-training grants for the same reason.

Even if the district court had jurisdiction, the grant terminations “reflect quintessential policy judgments on hotly contested issues that should not be subject to judicial second-guessing,” Solicitor General John Sauer told the Supreme Court.

"It is hardly irrational for agencies to recognize − as members of this Court have done − that paeans to 'diversity' often conceal invidious racial discrimination," he wrote.

The American Public Health Association said this case differs from the cuts to teacher-training grants that the Supreme Court allowed to proceed.

And allowing an "unprecedented disruption" to ongoing research into such matters as the cause of Alzheimer's, the drivers of heart disease in the rural South and the means for countering antibiotic resistance would cause "incalculable losses in public health," lawyers for the association told the Supreme Court.

The NIH is the primary source of federal funding for biomedical research in the United States, and is the largestpublic funder of biomedical research in the world.

The grants in this case represent a small portion of the research funding the Trump administration has terminated.

In June, dozens of scientists, researchers and other NIH employees signed an open letter criticizing the agency's actions and spending cuts under President Donald Trump, which they said politicize research and "harm the health of Americans and people across the globe."

Contributing: Reuters

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Supreme Court allows Trump to cut $783 million in NIH research grants he targeted for DEI

Reporting by Maureen Groppe, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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