SAN FRANCISCO — The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Science in the Public Interest back the lawsuit. In 2025, the Trump administration began canceling thousands of grants across government. More than 5,700 grants were disrupted at the NIH, according to Grant Witness.

The Trump administration has used a list of 235 keywords, including "gender" and "racist," to prevent topics from health equity to climate change from being funded. Arghavan Salles, a surgeon and clinical associate professor at the Stanford University Department of Medicine, described the impact on her work. Salles said that for more than 15 years, her research has focused on gender equity, sexual harassment, and the barriers that can push talented individuals out of science and medicine.

Salles noted that current restrictions prevent accurate descriptions of her studies. She said she can no longer accurately describe her research because using words like "gender," "equity," or "sexual harassment" would be flagged as inconsistent with NIH priorities. She added that scientists should not have to scrub their research to receive federal funding, particularly after taxpayers have already invested years in supporting this work.

Ann Cohen, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, detailed disruptions to her Alzheimer's disease study. Cohen said her study on Alzheimer's disease was designed to better understand how to identify and reduce the risk of dementia in communities who are at high risk of developing the disease, who have been historically understudied. She added that losing funding forced abrupt cancellations of participant appointments.

Cohen said losing this funding has forced them to abruptly cancel appointments for participants, preventing them from receiving promised research results, and slowing or stopping critical data analysis. Olga Akselrod, senior counsel in the ACLU's Racial Justice Program, criticized the administration's approach to funding decisions. Akselrod said the Trump administration is weaponizing federal research funding to suppress disfavored views, pressuring scientists to censor their work or risk losing funding for research that might produce results that don't conform to the administration's ideology.

Akselrod stated that statutory limits apply to agency discretion. She said that while the NIH can make calls about what topics to fund, it cannot do so in a manner that is inconsistent with governing statutes and regulations. She added that the First Amendment also ensures the NIH cannot screen out projects or applicants because it thinks they will express views the government does not like. More than 4,500 NIH grants have been restored.

Why It Matters

The NIH canceled grants totaling over $820 million in recent funding, with researchers reporting abrupt disruptions to projects on health equity, racial disparities, and gender-related topics. A federal judge in Boston ruled in June 2025 that the Trump administration's termination of NIH grants targeting diversity-related research was "void and illegal," citing constitutional and statutory violations.

Timeline

Researchers filed a class action lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health on Wednesday. The lawsuit argues the Trump administration is blocking and canceling scientific grants to censor topics with which it disagrees. The lawsuit argues the government is violating the first amendment of the constitution by censoring speech that it dislikes.

The lawsuit is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Science in the Public Interest. The suit seeks to cover all researchers whose grants have not otherwise been restored by court orders, as well as grants whose investigators have been forced to renegotiate, faced delays or denials. Health and Human Services Department published notice titled Draft NIH Biosafety Policy for Research Involving Biohazards on 2026-09-14.

What's New

National Institutes is US government medical research agency.