ACLU Sues RFK Jr., NIH Over Alleged Censorship of Medical Research Grants

Seventeen biomedical researchers represented by the American Civil Liberties Union sued Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and other federal defendants Wednesday, alleging the government is censoring federally funded science by targeting research involving subjects and viewpoints the Trump administration disfavors.

The proposed class action, filed in federal court in San Francisco, challenges a National Institutes of Health review process that researchers say can lead to grants being changed, denied or terminated even after they have passed scientific peer review. NIH allegedly uses a list of 235 terms to flag research for additional scrutiny, including “gender,” “equity,” “Latinx,” “climate change” and “pregnant individual.”

According to the complaint, computational text analysis is used to identify existing grants and new applications that may conflict with current agency priorities. Some researchers have then been asked to remove or replace flagged language to keep their funding or applications moving.

The case puts those funding decisions at the center of a First Amendment fight over viewpoint discrimination. Federal agencies have broad authority to set research priorities and determine which projects receive government money. The scientists argue NIH crossed a constitutional line by using anticipated viewpoints or language as a basis for deciding which research receives support.

The challenge also reaches the rules governing NIH grants. Researchers accuse the agency of departing from federal requirements intended to base biomedical funding decisions on scientific review and restrict when existing awards can be terminated.

Several scientists say the changes have already affected how they describe their work. University of Pennsylvania professor Dolores Albarracín, whose research includes HIV prevention, allegedly removed references to “health disparities,” “ethnic minority,” “Black” and “culturally diverse” from grant materials following NIH scrutiny. Her project was later approved.

Ann D. Cohen, a University of Pittsburgh researcher studying factors linked to Alzheimer’s disease, says she removed references to poverty, segregation and mortgage redlining after being told NIH funding could not support DEI-related activities. Her grant was terminated in July, according to the filing.

Stanford surgeon Arghavan Salles is challenging the cancellation of a five-year grant examining sexual harassment in biomedical research. NIH classified the project as DEI-related before terminating the award, the lawsuit alleges. Salles says the current screening process has also made it difficult to accurately describe research involving gender equity and sexual harassment when seeking federal funding.

Similar changes have reached reproductive health research. Epidemiologist Heidi Moseson alleges researchers seeking continued NIH support were asked to remove the word “abortion,” replace “policy restrictions” with “policy changes” and change “pregnant people” to “pregnant women.”

Bhattacharya has rejected the characterization that NIH maintains a banned-word list. During a July interview, he said he opposed banned words and described the terms used by the agency as a way to identify grants for human review.

A separate NIH court filing that month acknowledged the agency had used search terms, keywords or phrases to identify and terminate grants presumed to involve subjects or viewpoints that HHS and NIH no longer wanted to fund. The Trump administration has defended its broader overhaul of research funding as an effort to support sound science and reverse priorities it considers misguided.

Wednesday’s lawsuit follows more than a year of litigation over NIH grant cuts. A federal court ruled in June 2025 that earlier DEI-related terminations were unlawful, although the Supreme Court later allowed NIH to proceed with cuts affecting $783 million in grants. A federal appeals court separately concluded in May that similar funding actions likely violated the First Amendment, a ruling the administration has asked the Supreme Court to review.

The new case focuses on the continuing screening of research grants and applications. The researchers are seeking class-wide relief that would block the challenged policies, require NIH to reconsider affected applications and restore grants terminated under the disputed system.