Gorsuch Issues Warning to Lower Courts After Repeatedly Defying Supreme Court Rulings…

 

The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the Trump administration to stop millions of dollars in National Institutes of Health grants linked to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, gender-identity research, and some COVID-19 studies. The 5–4 ruling was a clear win for the White House and another public clash between the justices and lower federal courts.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, joined in a concurrence by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, accused district and appeals judges of ignoring high-court precedent. “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,” he wrote. Judges may disagree with the Court’s holdings, he said, but they are bound to apply them rather than work around them.

The fight began after U.S. District Judge William Young in Massachusetts ordered NIH to keep paying the disputed awards. Young found that the funding cuts unlawfully discriminated against racial minorities and LGBTQ communities. Democratic state attorneys general and public-health groups had sued, arguing the administration was improperly targeting entire research areas.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett supplied the fifth vote with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito. In a separate part of the case, Barrett joined Chief Justice John Roberts and the Court’s three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — in leaving intact a lower-court decision that struck down certain NIH guidance documents describing agency priorities.

The net result is that Judge Young’s funding order is gone and the administration may redirect the research money. Since returning to office in 2025, President Trump has used executive orders to unwind DEI programs put in place under the prior administration, calling them ideological and divisive.

Legal analysts see the decision as part of a running struggle over how faithfully lower courts follow Supreme Court rulings, especially in emergency and stay litigation. Supporters say the Court restored the executive’s authority to set spending priorities and keep taxpayer-funded science politically neutral. Critics say the cuts will damage public-health research and inject partisan control into scientific grantmaking.

The case sits at the intersection of presidential power over the budget, the independence of federal science agencies, and the judiciary’s role in reviewing administrative action. Whatever the policy merits, the majority’s message to the lower courts was blunt: when the Supreme Court has spoken, the obligation is to follow, not to resist.