New lawsuit argues NIH violated First Amendment rights of grant applicants
A group of researchers — 13 named and four anonymous — are suing the National Institutes of Health, alleging the agency infringed on their freedom of speech by screening grants for certain words and phrases when making funding decisions. The suit seeks to halt the process of searching both applications and current grants for specific terms to determine whether they should be rejected.
The screening has largely focused on research topics the Trump administration disfavors, including efforts to diversify the research workforce, and studies on health disparities, climate change, and vaccines. Because the case was filed as a class action lawsuit, if a judge sides with the plaintiffs, the decision would apply not just to the 17 scientist plaintiffs but to any researcher whose work has been affected by the term searches.
After Trump returned to office, his administration began trying to remake federally funded biomedical research, terminating wide swaths of funding for research it deemed out of step with its priorities. Hundreds of those grants were later reinstated when a federal judge ruled that the slap-dash nature of the terminations violated the Administrative Procedures Act, which regulates how agencies change policies. After that ruling, the agency shifted from mass terminations to scrutinizing the language used in grants it funds. Officials began "renegotiating" grants, as the process has been called by NIH employees and grantees, asking grantees to tweak the language in their applications. In 2025, more than 700 grantees changed their titles to remove phrases like "equity," "disparity," and "racism," among others. That scrutiny has also been applied to researchers applying for new grants, and a "computational text analysis" tool has helped review the NIH's portfolio.
"NIH supplemented the directives at issue in APHA with a series of additional directives, guidance, and policies that purported to replace the vacated directives, but in fact just continued the viewpoint-based purge of existing grants. It's more of the same," said Olga Akselrod, a senior counsel at the ACLU who represented researchers in both cases. The first suit also did not recoup funding for all researchers. Arghavan Salles, one of the named plaintiffs in the new filing, had her R01 terminated; her project focused on the sexual harassment researchers experience during their training. It was not reinstated, and she has since struggled to apply for funding without using certain words or phrases. "I couldn't talk about my research on implicit bias or microaggressions or sexual harassment or belonging. I couldn't use any of those words," she said.