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The Trump administration's losing streak in court continues, this time over its attempt to cut funding for biomedical research -- a move that would have threatened life-saving studies on cancer, heart disease, brain disorders, Alzheimer's, and a host of other health-related issues. From a report at CNN, under the headline "Trump tried massive cuts to health research; the swift legal response shows that courts aren’t holding back":
Among dozens of court cases challenging President Donald Trump’s policies, one case this week has moved faster than most.
In less than 24 hours, the American medical community and dozens of universities secured an early win in blocking the Trump administration’s effort to cut millions of dollars of federal funding supporting medical research.
After the Trump administration capped the amount of money research institutions receive from the government to support health research, 22 states plus health-care systems and universities from across the country filed multiple lawsuits on Monday to stop it.
By midnight, a federal judge issued a nationwide injunction blocking the cutbacks — marking one of the fastest-moving, most robust examples yet of the courts standing in the way of Trump’s efforts to overhaul the U.S. government.
As Trump and his DOGE chief, Elon Musk, have taken a sledgehammer to the federal government – stopping federal foreign aid, firing federal workers, ending government programs and even closing agencies altogether – the unprecedented executive actions have been met by nearly four dozen emergency lawsuits designed to slow or stop them.
So far, the lawsuits have been effective: The Trump administration was told in five different ways on Monday and once on Tuesday it must stop or pause the implementation of its policies.
That included federal judges blocking Trump’s ban on birthright citizenship, pausing its effort to offer “buyouts” to federal workers, restoring the flow of federal money to environmental and health-care programs, reinstating (at least temporarily) the top investigator for federal whistleblowers who had been fired, ordering some health-care data to be posted again to government websites, and blocking the attempt to cut federally subsidized medical research.
These early legal wins – even temporary ones – are quickly creating a new playbook for how Trump policies are tested and responded to.
“What we’re seeing is an effort to arrogate control over federal spending on a scale we’ve never seen, and with callous disregard for the consequences. And the courts are responding in kind,” Steve Vladeck, a Georgetown University Law Center professor and CNN legal analyst, said Tuesday morning about Trump’s approach so far.
Often the judges sitting at the trial-court level have tried to preserve the status quo before irreversible harm could be done. Trump administration officials say they were expecting these early moves to be challenged in court, and in many cases, legal issues will be revisited in the days and months ahead, by multiple levels of courts, including potentially the US Supreme Court.
Trump officials, as well as the president, have bristled at some of the judicial rulings, with Vice President J.D. Vance and Musk both suggesting the administration should disregard court rulings, a scenario that has raised fears the country could be barreling toward a constitutional crisis.
Trump criticized the judges in a radio interview Monday, saying they made “very bad rulings” and that “they want to sort of tell everybody how to run the country.”
Trump seems to be saying that he, and he alone, should run the country -- never mind that our democracy is built on a "separation of powers" system that gives the legislative and judicial branches an equal say to that of the executive branch. For now, at least, Trump's view of how our government should function is taking its lumps in court. From CNN:
The cases so far have demonstrated how the Trump policies that startled Washington over the past four weeks could change American life – from reshaping the national approach to immigration to curtailing medical research and foreign aid programs. The research universities, for instance, said on Monday a loss of millions of federal dollars that supports their labs’ overhead costs would “devastate medical research.”
Lawmakers from both parties raised concerns that the cuts would hit their local economies, both in blue and red states.
Massachusetts took the lead in one of the challenges to the National Institutes of Health grant funding cuts, which had been announced by the Trump administration last Friday. The state was the first mover because of how deeply the policy would affect universities’ research programs there, slashing tens of millions of dollars in federal support for institutional overhead costs – but also because the state is among several Democrat-led states that are mounting some of the most significant challenges against the administration.
“We will not allow the Trump administration to play politics with public health,” Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell said at a press conference on Monday.
The response to medical funding cuts was one of many cases where Trump’s actions have been almost immediately challenged in court.
The lawsuits that have been filed fall into several categories. They include questions about whether the president can halt funding approved by Congress or fire whole categories of federal workers, whether privacy protections can prevent Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency from accessing personal data held by the government, and whether the Trump administration’s social policies and immigration crackdown stretch beyond the limits of law and Constitution.
Republicans, as has become their custom, seem content to let Trump try whatever he wants. That has helped spark concern about how Team Trump might respond to court orders it dislikes:
One of the rulings that’s sparked the strongest reaction from Trump’s allies was when a federal judge this past weekend blocked DOGE from accessing a critical Treasury Department payment system, which the judge said risked “irreparable harm.”
The efforts from Musk’s team to access the Treasury’s payment system – which doles out trillions of dollars in government spending – prompted five former Treasury secretaries to write a joint op-ed on Monday saying they were so “alarmed about the risks of arbitrary and capricious political control of federal payments” and that, if pursued, Trump’s approach would be “unlawful and corrosive to our democracy.”
The backlash to the judge’s ruling on the Treasury system from both inside and outside the Trump administration – including from Trump and Vance – raised new concerns that the Trump White House will ignore court orders. . .
Judges are already warning the administration not to ignore their rulings. On Monday, a federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the reinstatement of funding for environmental and health groups that was held up, writing that the administration violated the “plain text” of his earlier order unfreezing billions of dollars in federal aid.
And in a separate case Monday, in Washington, DC, federal employees told a judge that the administration had failed to reinstate USAID workers who were put on leave. A major hearing in that case is set for today.
A final note: The damage from Trump's attempted actions hardly would be limited to Massachusetts or the Northeast. In Alabama, a decidedly red state, the heart of its biomedical research enterprise is in Birmingham, where studies at the UAB Medical Center have replaced the declining steel industry as a driver of the economy. The harm to the city and state financial pictures would be severe if Trump had his way. (Full disclosure: In my capacity as an editor in UAB Communications, I frequently wrote about biomedical research at the university and was familiar with its impact on the statewide economy. Call me stunned that even a president as clueless as Trump would try to take a figurative dump on Birmingham, which has enormous potential to become a "New South" city.)
Birmingham and Alabama are not alone in feeling the threat. Across the South, the economies of urban centers -- Nashville, TN; Tampa, FL; Atlanta, GA, New Orleans, LA, Memphis, TN (home to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, an affiliate of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center) -- are heavily dependent on biomedical research. All four of the states mentioned above voted for Trump in 2024, so they are largely responsible for him being in office. One might think Trump would be at least a little concerned about threatening their economies. But he apparently is ill informed or simply does not care. Voters in Deep South states should remember that as the next four years. unfold.
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