On August 21, 2025, the United States Supreme Court allowed the federal government to proceed with the cancelation of $783 million in funding grants from the National Institutes of Health (“NIH”) to universities and research institutions. Previously, a federal district court declared the government’s cancellation of the grants, and the NIH guidance documents on which it relied to cancel those grants, to be unlawful and the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit denied the government’s application to stay the district court’s rulings pending appeal. A closely divided Supreme Court left in place the district court’s ruling vacating the guidance documents while simultaneously staying the district court’s order that invalidated the government’s move to terminate the funding grants.
The justices issued a complicated series of opinions relating to the court’s order. Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the majority, concluding that the Court’s split opinion was necessary to ensure the government’s claims are channeled to the appropriate venue in the lower courts. Justice Barrett said the government’s claim regarding its ability to cancel the funding grants belonged before the U.S. Court of Federal Claims (“CFC”), which handles contract disputes involving the federal government. But Justice Barrett said the challenge to the NIH’s guidance documents was properly before the federal district court. “Two-track litigation,” she wrote, “results from the jurisdictional scheme governing actions against the United States, which often requires plaintiffs to file two actions in different courts to obtain complete relief in connection with one set of facts.”
The Court also stated in its opinion that the government must be allowed to cancel the funding grants because the funds may not be recoverable after the recipients expended them. The Court reasoned that “the plaintiffs’ contention that they lack the resources to continue their research projects without federal funding is inconsistent with the proposition that they have the resources to make the Government whole for money already spent.”
Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh agreed with Justice Barrett to the extent the Court vacated the district court’s order terminating the NIH funding grants, but they would have also stayed the portion of the district court’s order that declared the NIH’s guidance documents unlawful.
In his separate opinion, Justice Gorsuch rebuked the district court (and other district courts) for failing to follow Supreme Court precedent. Justice Gorsuch wrote that “[l]ower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them.”
Chief Justice Roberts did not agree that the district court was required to split the case into two parts. Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson agreed that the plaintiffs were not required to proceed before separate courts.
Justice Jackson, in a sharply worded opinion, criticized the Court for “sending [the] plaintiffs on a likely futile, multivenue quest for complete relief.” She did not agree that the Court’s precedents required allowing the government to terminate the funding grants. She also expressed concern that the government’s rushed cancellation of funding grants would halt life-saving biomedical research.
A copy of the Court’s opinion is available here.
