Dive Brief: 

• A group of researchers sued the National Institutes of Health on Wednesday, arguing that the agency violated their First Amendment rights by targeting work focused on diversity, equity and inclusion and other subjects disfavored by the Trump administration. 
• The lawsuit alleges that NIH is screening grants for 235 keywords related to DEI, gender identity, climate change, vaccines, misinformation and other topics. If grants are flagged, researchers often must either scrub mentions of those subjects from their work, modify their projects or risk having their grants terminated, according to the complaint. 
• The researchers are seeking class-action status for their lawsuit. The plaintiffs asked the federal judge overseeing the case to declare the challenged policies unconstitutional and order the agency to restore the grants terminated under them. 

Dive Insight: 

The lawsuit said numerous grants have been upended because of the new policies, ranging from studies examining populations at high risk of dementia to investigating different rates of kidney disease across people from different racial backgrounds. 

“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, one of the groups representing the plaintiffs — said in a statement. 

The NIH said Friday it does not comment on ongoing litigation.

The lawsuit notes that a series of executive orders signed by President Donald Trump kicked off the mass grant terminations last year. However, those cancellations slowed in the fall of 2025 after the Trump administration suffered several court losses. 

One such loss was U.S. District Judge William Young’s order striking down the NIH’s internal guidance that directed staff to terminate grants that were out of step with the Trump administration’s priorities, such as those related to DEI and vaccine hesitancy. 

Young also ordered the NIH to restore the canceled research grants, but the U.S. Supreme Court later blocked that element of his order. However, the top court left standing the part of Young’s order that vacated NIH’s guidance. 

Yet the Trump administration has ramped up grant terminations once again, according to the new lawsuit. The researchers allege that the agency has replaced the vacated policies with new guidance from NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya that similarly targets grants with viewpoints that the Trump administration disfavors. 

In August 2025, Bhattacharya issued guidance saying that research aiming to identify “the harms” caused by “puberty suppression, hormone therapy or surgical intervention” was more promising than studying those approaches as treatments for gender dysphoria, according to the lawsuit.

The NIH later softened that element of the guidance in a July update — a move the lawsuit said was “perhaps recognition that it is illegal (not to mention bad science) for an agency to fund the speech of those who espouse a particular hypothesis while defunding all those who it believes might conclude the opposite.” 

Despite the different language, the lawsuit said it’s not apparent that the NIH has likewise changed how it implements the policy. 

The August 2025 guidance from Bhattacharya also targeted other types of research, according to the lawsuit.

For instance, it said the NIH won’t support research that attributes negative health outcomes in certain groups to “poorly measured factors like systemic racism.” While the August 2025 guidance acknowledged that redlining and housing discrimination “can measurably impact the health of minority populations,” the NIH's July update removed that line and said references to systemic racism shouldn’t be included in research proposals, according to the lawsuit.

The NIH’s new guidance applies to all existing and new grants, and units within the NIH have been ordered to screen their grant portfolios for keywords to identify awards that don’t align with the Trump administration’s priorities, according to the lawsuit. Those terms range from “gender” and “racist” to “climate change” and “vaccine refusal.”

In a separate lawsuit brought by University of California researchers, several agencies including NIH have confirmed they’ve used vast keyword lists to target grants. 

According to Wednesday's complaint, researchers often must renegotiate the “scope or language of the project” if their projects are flagging under this process. If they refuse, they can face having their grants terminated. 

Meanwhile, researchers applying for new grants are preemptively scrubbing their applications of words that could be flagged, “even when the changes render their proposals less clear or less accurate,” according to the lawsuit. 

The plaintiffs have asked the court to recognize two classes. The first would include all researchers whose grants have been terminated under the challenged policies. The second would include researchers who’ve had their applications for grants denied under the contested guidance, been subject to rephrasing or renegotiating their grants, or skipped applying for grants because of the new policies. 

“The NIH’s new policies, which are essentially a political litmus test, violate the First Amendment, undermine science and education, and have cost universities tens of millions of dollars in cancelled grants,” Grayce Zelphin, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said in a statement Wednesday.