Attorney General Bonta Secures Significant Victory Against Trump Administration, Ending Unlawful Delays in Review of Medical and Public Health Research Grants

OAKLAND — California Attorney General Rob Bonta secured a multistate settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that permanently resolves claims made in a lawsuit he co-led in April challenging the Trump Administration’s unlawful delays in reviewing National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant applications. As part of the agreement, which remains subject to court approval, HHS commits to resuming the usual process for considering NIH grant applications on a prompt, agreed-upon timeline. The aforementioned lawsuit filed by Attorney General Bonta also alleged that NIH had terminated large swaths of already-issued grants for projects that are currently underway based on the projects’ perceived connection to “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI),” “transgender issues,” “vaccine hesitancy,” and other topics disfavored by the current Administration. Today’s agreement limits NIH from applying those directives while reviewing applications for new grants.

“I am pleased that the Trump Administration has agreed to stop delaying the review process for NIH grants. That, of course, should have never happened in the first place, and it’s why my fellow attorneys general and I took the Administration to court earlier this year,” said Attorney General Bonta. “Going forward, we remain committed to ensuring HHS fulfills its obligations under the agreement.”

NIH grant applications typically undergo several rounds of 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 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. In California, NIH funding creates over 50,000 jobs and billions of dollars in economic activity. Over the decades, this funding has brought humanity the eradication of polio, discovery of genes that cause breast and ovarian cancer, and the transformation of HIV from a fatal disease into one people can live with.

Today’s 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 U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts 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.

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