A US district court judge in Washington DC has declined to restore approximately 1600 research grants worth more than $1 billion (£740 million) that were awarded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF). Organisations representing university faculty, graduate students, postdocs and other staff working on campuses that brought the case are disappointed but are vowing to continue fighting for the restoration of the grants.
On 10 September, Judge Jia Cobb elected not to issue a preliminary injunction to return these grants that the Trump administration began terminating in early April. The judge ruled that ‘a federal award “may be terminated in part or its entirety” for many broad reasons, including “if an award no longer effectuates the programme goals or agency priorities.”’ She said such language ‘explicitly gives the [agency] unfettered discretion to terminate NSF grants, even if grantees have met all substantive requirements, if it concludes, in its own judgment, that the grants are no longer consistent with the Foundation’s goals or priorities’.
Further, Cobb concluded that the plaintiffs had ‘failed to identify any provisions in the governing NSF statutes or regulations cabining the agency’s discretion so dramatically’ to indicate they have a constitutionally protected property interest in their NSF grant agreements.
Although she denied the motion for a preliminary injunction, which would have either allowed those funds to continue flowing or not be capped back, the lawsuit continues.
‘While we are deeply disappointed in the court’s decision to allow the termination of grants to stand while we argue this case on the merits, we are as united and committed as ever to ultimately winning this case and protecting these important NSF grants,’ the coalition stated. ‘The Trump–Vance administration acted unlawfully when it terminated these crucial grants. It attempted to usurp congressional authority by eliminating funding required by law. This case is not over and we are eager to defend the important role the NSF plays in the daily lives of Americans.’
The development comes after a federal judge in Massachusetts, Allison Burroughs, earlier this month ordered the government to reverse more than $2 billion in cuts to research grants at Harvard University that the Trump administration claimed were because the institution had failed to adequately protect Jewish students on campus from antisemitic discrimination and harassment. The court ruled that the elimination of these grants was unconstitutional and that the Trump administration ‘used antisemitism as a smokescreen’ for an ideologically motivated attack on the university.
Judge Burroughs vacated the so-called ‘freeze orders’ and argued that the cancellation of this research funding ‘jeopardised decades of research and the welfare of all those who could stand to benefit from that research’.
In addition, last month a federal judge in California directed the Trump administration to restore hundreds of research grants that it suspended at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) earlier in the summer over alleged civil rights violations. Judge Rita Lin ordered the Trump administration to restore the funding, arguing that the grant suspensions violated her June preliminary injunction that the NSF must restore 114 grants it had terminated at the University of California.
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