Washington secures agreement with HHS preventing further delays in medical and public health research

Following lawsuit by coalition, the Trump administration has agreed to cease delays in reviewing NIH grant applications 

Attorney General Nick Brown secured a settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) requiring HHS to quickly resume the review process for critical medical and public health research grants issued by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that the Trump administration has unlawfully delayed. Brown and a coalition of 16 attorneys general had previously won a lawsuit challenging the administration’s unlawful directives to blacklist certain funding topics from NIH funding.  

“This agreement reaffirms that the federal government can’t stop legitimate research simply because it may have included words or phrases that scare the President and his political allies,” Brown said. “Thanks to our suit, funds will once again begin to flow to Washington’s centers of research.”

NIH grant applications typically undergo rigorous review by subject-matter experts and agency officials who assess each proposal’s scientific merit in light of funding availability and agency priorities. Earlier this year, the Administration took the unprecedented step of cancelling essentially all upcoming meetings for the agency’s review panels and delaying the scheduling of future meetings. The Administration also indefinitely withheld issuing final decisions on applications that had already received approval from the relevant review panels, leaving the plaintiff states awaiting decisions on billions of dollars in requested research funding.

As a result of the Administration’s delays and terminations, the states alleged that their public research institutions experienced significant harm. For example, the University of Washington received more than 1,220 NIH grants, totaling over $648 million in Fiscal Year 2024. The funding disruptions have forced the university to furlough and potentially lay off research staff and faculty and cut admissions to graduate programs, impacting programs such as cancer research and Alzheimer’s research.

This settlement agreement commits HHS to resuming the usual process for considering NIH grant applications on a prompt, agreed-upon timeline. The agreement complements the coalition’s victory in an earlier phase of the lawsuit, in which the plaintiff states challenged unlawful directives that targeted NIH projects based on their perceived connection to “DEI,” “transgender issues,” “vaccine hesitancy,” and other topics disfavored by the Trump Administration. The District Court found for the plaintiff states and set aside the unlawful directives; a hearing on the federal government’s appeal of that decision is scheduled for January 6, 2026. The current settlement agreement limits NIH from applying the unlawful directives while reviewing applications for new grants.

Joining Brown in reaching this settlement are the attorneys general of Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Hawaiʻi, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.   

Read the stipulation and proposed order.

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