Researchers sue National Institutes of Health over censorship claims

Sept. 16 (UPI) — Scientific researchers filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the National Institutes of Health, saying that Trump administration policies of blocking and canceling grants related to topics it dislikes amount to unconstitutional censorship.

One of the researchers, Arghavan Salles, a surgeon and clinical associate professor at the Stanford University Department of Medicine, said in a statement that their research has, for more than 15 years, “focused on gender equity, sexual harassment and the barriers that can push talented individuals out of science and medicine.”

“Now, I can no longer accurately describe my research because using words like ‘gender,’ ‘equity’ or ‘sexual harassment’ would be flagged as inconsistent with NIH priorities,” Salles said. “Scientists should not have to scrub their research to receive federal funding.”

NIH is the world’s largest funder of biomedical research. It now uses a list of 235 keywords and terms — including “gender,” “climate change,” “fossil fuel,” “justice” and many phrases including “diversity” — to identify grants or researchers likely to express or support views the Trump administration does not support and prevent them from being funded.

The lawsuit is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, as well as other groups. The ACLU said in a press release that the NIH “is unconstitutionally censoring research and allowing political ideology to override scientific expertise in determining which projects receive federal funding, contrary to congressional mandates.”

The keyword screening is applied to both already-funded awards and new funding applications, the ACLU said, “which have already passed through rounds of peer scientific review and been approved by the NIH officials that Congress has identified as the proper decisionmakers.

“This additional layer of ideological review is a departure from the NIH’s longstanding approach and contrary to congressional mandates designed to prevent the politicization of the NIH award process,” the organization said.

Ann D. Cohen, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, said a canceled study on Alzheimer’s disease was designed to better understand how to identify and reduce the risk of dementia in communities who have been historically understudied.

“For more than a decade, our team has built trusted relationships with communities that have too often been excluded from research, giving us critical information that can help improve early detection and treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, work that benefits everyone,” Cohen said. “Losing this funding has forced us to abruptly cancel appointments for participants, preventing them from receiving promised research results, and slowing or stopping critical data analysis. This puts years of trust and scientific progress at risk.”

The NIH changes started in 2025 in Trump’s second term. The administration began to cancel thousands of grants across the government, disrupting more than 5,700 at the NIH, The Guardian reported.

More than 4,500 have been restored, but the suit seeks to cover the researchers whose grants have not been otherwise restored by court order or those otherwise affected by denials, denials or renegotiation over the keywords.