Trump administration urges Supreme Court docket to pause order requiring cost of grants linked to DEI initiatives

The Trump administration got here once again to the Supreme Court docket on Thursday afternoon and asked the justices to pause an order by a federal court docket in Massachusetts that might require the Nationwide Institutes of Well being to pay grants that NIH had terminated as a result of they conflicted with the Trump administration’s “coverage positions on range, fairness, and inclusion.” U.S. Solicitor Common D. John Sauer informed the justices that the case “presents a very clear case for this Court docket to intervene and cease errant district courts from persevering with to ignore this Court docket’s rulings.”

The federal government depends on an April 4, 2025, order through which the Supreme Court docket temporarily allowed the Division of Schooling to halt tens of millions of {dollars} in teacher-training grants that included funding for DEI initiatives. In an unsigned three-page opinion in that case, a divided court docket concluded that the federal government is more likely to present that U.S. District Choose Myong Joun didn’t have the authority to order the federal government to make the funds beneath the federal regulation governing administrative businesses. A federal regulation often known as the Tucker Act, the bulk careworn, offers the Court docket of Federal Claims the ability to listen to lawsuits arising from contracts with the US.

As soon as the funds have been disbursed, the bulk reasoned, the federal government doubtless wouldn’t be capable of get them again. Against this, the bulk prompt, the recipients of the funds wouldn’t be completely harmed if the funds are withheld whereas the litigation continues, as a result of they’ll all the time search reimbursement later.

In his submitting on Thursday, Sauer argued that the Supreme Court docket’s ruling within the Division of Schooling case ought to foreclose any effort to require NIH to proceed paying out grant funds on this case. He complained that defiance by district courts of the Division of Schooling ruling “has grown to epidemic proportions.”

And he pointed to Wednesday’s ruling clearing the way in which for the Trump administration to fireside three Democratic appointees to the Client Product Security Fee, through which it had defined that the end result was “squarely management[led]” by the court docket’s order in a similar case from May.

“As this Court docket defined yesterday,” Sauer wrote, “when decrease courts face materially equivalent keep requests, this Court docket’s emergency orders ‘squarely management[].’ Our judicial system rests on vertical stare decisis” – that’s, the concept that decrease courts ought to adhere to the precedents set by larger courts – quite than on “a lower-court free-for-all the place particular person district judges be happy to raise their very own coverage judgements over these of the Government Department, and their very own authorized judgments over these of this Court docket.”