Scientists Sue NIH Over Grant Screening, Alleging First Amendment Breach

A group of scientists filed a class-action lawsuit on Wednesday against the U.S. National Institutes of Health, accusing the agency of unconstitutionally screening research grants to suppress viewpoints disfavored by the Trump administration on subjects such as diversity, gender identity and climate change.

The complaint, lodged in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, names NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and DOGE as defendants. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and other organizations are backing the suit.

According to the plaintiffs, the NIH — the world's largest public funder of biomedical research — relies on a list of 235 keywords, among them "gender," "Latinx" and "climate change," to flag grants for termination, denial or forced renegotiation. Researchers who decline to remove flagged terms risk losing their funding, the complaint states.

The NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The case is the latest challenge to research funding cuts that the administration describes as necessary to ensure federal money supports only sound science and to reverse what it calls years of misguided priorities.

The suit argues that the screening is applied to grants that have already passed scientific peer review, amounting to an additional layer of ideological review that breaks with the NIH's longstanding practice and with congressional mandates prohibiting politicization.

"Scientists should not have to scrub their research to receive federal funding," Arghavan Salles, a surgeon and clinical associate professor at Stanford University, said in a statement. She said her grant on sexual harassment in biomedical research was terminated as "DEI-related," a reference to diversity, equity and inclusion.

The complaint alleges violations of the First Amendment and breaches of statutes governing grant terminations. It asks the court to vacate the policies and restore terminated grants.

In June 2025, a federal court ruled that the NIH's DEI-related grant terminations were unlawful, but in August 2025 the Supreme Court allowed the agency to proceed with cutting $783 million in such grants. A federal appeals court ruled in May 2026 that the terminations likely violated the First Amendment, and the administration has asked the Supreme Court to review that decision.