In mid-June, a federal judge issued a stinging rebuke to the Trump administration, declaring that its decision to cancel the funding for many grants issued by the National Institutes of Health was illegal, and suggesting that the policy was likely animated by racism. But the detailed reasoning behind his decision wasn't released at the time. The written portion of the decision was finally issued on Wednesday, and it has a number of notable features.
For starters, it's more limited in scope due to a pair of Supreme Court decisions that were issued in the intervening weeks. As a consequence, far fewer grants will see their funding restored. Regardless, the court continues to find that the government's actions were arbitrary and capricious, in part because the government never bothered to define the problems that would get a grant canceled. As a result, officials within the NIH simply canceled lists of grants they received from DOGE without bothering to examine their scientific merit, and then struggled to retroactively describe a policy that justified the actions afterward—a process that led several of them to resign.
A more limited verdict
The issue before Judge William Young of the District of Massachusetts was whether the government had followed the law in terminating grants funded by the National Institutes of Health. After a short trial, Young issued a verbal ruling that the government hadn't, and that he had concluded that its actions were the product of "racial discrimination and discrimination against America’s LGBTQ. community." But the details of his decisions and the evidence that motivated them had to wait for a written ruling, which is now available.
In the meantime, however, the Supreme Court had shifted the ground on a couple of issues. For example, while Young still feels that policy decisions were motivated by discrimination against the LGBTQ community, the United States v. Skrmetti decision limits what he can do about it. Young writes that the decision "leads this Court to conclude that, while here there is federal government discrimination based on a person’s status, not all discrimination is pejorative."