A Supreme Court justice appointed by President Donald Trump is fed up.
Justice Neil Gorsuch on Thursday blasted lower courts for repeatedly defying rulings from the highest court in the land, as the justices handed the Trump administration a narrow victory in a case over federal research grants.
In a 5-4 decision, the Court allowed the administration to cut millions of dollars in National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants that supported projects tied to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, gender identity research, and COVID-19. The NIH, the world’s largest source of public biomedical research funding, will no longer award grants based on race or DEI objectives under the ruling, The Daily Caller reported.
“This marks the third time in a matter of weeks this Court has had to reverse a lower court on an issue it had already addressed,” Gorsuch wrote, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them.”
The case arose after a federal judge in Massachusetts ordered the government to continue payments despite a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year permitting Trump to cut similar DEI-related grants. A coalition of 16 Democratic attorneys general and public health groups sued, alleging discrimination.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett provided the deciding vote. She joined conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh in terminating the NIH grants, but sided with Chief Justice John Roberts and the three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — to leave intact a lower court’s decision scrapping NIH guidance documents that described the agency’s policy priorities.
Gorsuch stressed that the district court’s actions were not a “one-off,” pointing to two other recent cases where lower courts resisted Supreme Court orders.
In July, the justices ruled 7-2 to block a district court’s attempt to override the high court’s order allowing Trump to resume third-country deportations. Even Justice Elena Kagan, who had dissented from the original ruling, sided with the majority to enforce the order.
“I do not see how a district court can compel compliance with an order that this Court has stayed,” she wrote.
That same month, the high court struck down another lower court ruling that sought to block Trump from firing three Democratic members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC). The justices had already granted Trump authority in May to dismiss members of administrative agencies.
“All these interventions should have been unnecessary, but together they underscore a basic tenet of our judicial system: Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect ‘the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress,’” Gorsuch wrote.
Since returning to office in January 2025, Trump has signed executive orders dismantling Biden-era DEI programs, calling them “radical” and “shameful discrimination.” Last April, the Court upheld Trump’s authority to cut teacher training grants linked to DEI, a precedent Gorsuch said the Massachusetts court ignored in this NIH case.
Since the ruling halts immediate funding, the administration is likely to count it as another win in the series of emergency appeals it has brought to the high court.
In a concurring opinion, Barrett wrote that the case should have been filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in Washington rather than in a district court. That court hears disputes involving federal contracts and could award damages later, but would not provide immediate relief.
The decision reversed U.S. District Judge William Young, a Reagan appointee, who in June ordered NIH to restore the grants after lawsuits from researchers and 16 Democratic-led states. Young used unusually sharp language, declaring: “This represents racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community. I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.”
It is unclear why the judge legally compelled the Trump administration to fund programs to “raise awareness” about LGBTQ issues or why that is tantamount to “discrimination.”