10/21/2026
In case you missed it: we're suing NIH, HHS, and DOGE.
On Sep. 16, 2026, CSPI’s Litigation Department and its co-counsel at the ACLU, Protect Democracy, and Jacobson Lawyers Group PLLC sued NIH, HHS, and DOGE, challenging NIH’s ideologically driven censorship and termination of biomedical research grants.
Over the last century, NIH has developed into the global leader in biomedical research, providing thousands of grant awards on myriad topics to researchers in all 50 states and abroad. NIH’s funding is highly sought-after and competitive, requiring researchers to submit detailed applications that go through rigorous layers of expert scientific review over many months. For decades, terminations of ongoing NIH grants have been exceedingly rare.
That all changed in Feb. 2025, when NIH and HHS issued a series of policies, based on executive orders issued by President Trump, aimed at cutting research that expresses views the administration disfavors. This has impacted viewpoints on topics including "diversity, equity, and inclusion," gender identity, climate change, misinformation, and more. Thousands of research grants have been terminated, while many more researchers have seen their applications denied or funding delayed as a result of the administration’s ideological purge.
The lawsuit contends that NIH’s current viewpoint-based policies violate the First Amendment, which prohibits NIH from screening out projects or applicants because it thinks they’ll express views the government does not like. In addition, NIH is violating statutes designed to ensure federal public health grants are awarded based on scientific merit, not politics, and regulations limiting when the government can terminate grants.
NIH is using a troubling list of 235 keywords as proxies to identify those grants in connection with the agency thinks researchers are likely to express or support viewpoints this administration does not like. The forbidden terms include "equity," "advancing diversity," "racist," "gender," "Latinx," "climate change," and "pregnant individual," among others. This list is being used to review grant applications as well. Some grants and applications are summarily terminated or denied, while NIH has sought to renegotiate others, requiring researchers to scrub their grant materials of flagged words. If the researcher refuses, NIH terminates the grant or stops the application from advancing.
This case is of the upmost importance: To silence research-related speech is to tell researchers what questions not to ask, what answers not to find, and which patients not to help.
As your food and health watchdog, CSPI is fighting back against the Trump administration's efforts to dismantle and weaponize public health agencies to push their own ideological agenda. Beyond NIH research grants, CSPI is calling out RFK Jr.'s misinformation and broken promises on nutrition policy, sounding the alarm on vaccine policy changes, demanding more food safety funding at the CDC, and so much more.
Because all of this takes a lot of work, we need your support more than ever to defend public health.
