More than a dozen researchers accused the National Institutes of Health of unconstitutionally blocking grants for projects that don't reflect the Trump administration’s views on topics including gender identity and climate change in a class action lawsuit.
The 17 researchers, whose legal counsel includes the American Civil Liberties Union, Protect Democracy and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, sued the agency along with Director Jay Bhattacharya, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and several federal institutions.
The researchers "recognize that the government may set funding priorities and decide among competing proposals consistent with the First Amendment,” said the complaint, which was filed in federal court in California
on Sept. 16. “What the First Amendment does not allow is the government’s use of its funding power to target or silence the expression of disfavored viewpoints within the biomedical research community.”
Both the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services declined to comment on the pending litigation.
NIH using list of 235 terms to screen projects, lawsuit says
The complaint alleged that in early 2025, the NIH and the now-defunct Department of Government Efficiency “used keyword searches for terms related to ‘DEI’ and ‘gender identity’ to abruptly terminate thousands of projects perceived or expected to communicate viewpoints disfavored” by the Trump administration.
The alleged “purge” continued through that summer, according to the lawsuit, and eventually included topics such as climate change and misinformation. More than 4,000 clinical trials, training programs and research projects were canceled as a result, the lawsuit said.
The first wave of terminations slowed by fall 2025, but “viewpoint-based terminations” have since resumed, the lawsuit alleged. It said current grants or pending applications are being screened through a list of 235 terms that “serve as proxies for the disfavored viewpoints,” including “gender,” “racist,” “trans” and “climate change.”
If such terms are found, researchers are made to remove the terms or else face termination or revoked funding, the lawsuit said.
Bhattacharya has previously denied that the agency has a list of banned words but said officials "do need to have tools to identify" "whether something is good research or just politicized DEI." Such tools, he said in a PragerU interview in July, identify grants that are then subject to a "human review to decide, 'Is this good science or not?'"
Federal agencies have previously admitted to using keywords related to diversity, COVID-19 and other topics in terminating more than 1,000 research grants at the University of California.
The researchers' complaint referenced a June article in the scientific journal Nature that described the alleged 235-word list and cited an internal NIH document that purportedly said such terms are an "indicator that the grant likely needs, at a minimum, a revision to align its terminology with NIH priorities."
Grayce Zelphin, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California, in a Sept. 16 news releaseaccused the NIH’s current policies of being “essentially a political litmus test” that “violate the First Amendment, undermine science and education and have cost universities tens of millions of dollars in cancelled grants.”
“This isn’t just illegal, it hurts every person served by this research and unravels years of work by the scientific community,” Shalini Goel Agarwal, special counsel at Protect Democracy, said.
BrieAnna Frank's role covering First Amendment issues at USA TODAY is made possible by a collaboration among Freedom Forum, Journalism Funding Partners and the USA TODAY Network. Freedom Forum does not provide editorial input. Reach BrieAnna at bjfrank@usatoday.com and @brieannafrank on X and Bluesky.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Researchers say NIH grant screening process violates First Amendment
