Amid the whirlwind of policies the Trump administration has adopted in the name of government efficiency, from laying off federal workers to championing legislation that slashes Medicaid benefits, the defunding of scientific research has at times flown under the radar. Thankfully, the private efforts of a team of researchers behind Grant Watch have been tracking the impact. Since February, the administration has terminated about 2,500 grants issued by the National Institutes of Health, amounting to over $3B of lost funding. For context, publicly reported biomedical grant funding totaled $37B globally in 2022, and the NIH was responsible for over 80 percent of that figure. As reported by the New York Times and ProPublica, most of these grants are being cancelled for arbitrary and capricious reasons, such as the detection of flagged words in their proposals. Some of these words and phrases range have partisan or political connotations (e.g. LGBTQ, sex assigned at birth, health disparity), while others seem completely anodyne—“bias” has emerged as a particularly egregious example of a flagged word frequently used in science outside of any political context. The impact of these cancelled grants, let alone the future projects that will not receive funding, could set the world of science and biomedical research back for years, if not decades. 
 
Then, last week’s news offered up a bright spot. A district court judge (appointed by Reagan) ruled that the termination of NIH contracts was “void and illegal” and ordered the reinstatement of grants identified by the plaintiffs. Furthermore, he went on to say, “This represents racial discrimination, and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ community … I would be blind not to call it out. My duty is to call it out.” As with all judicial actions short of the Supreme Court, questions of scope, appeal, and enforcement remain, but it’s heartening to see a federal judge stand up for scientists and marginalized communities so strongly.