Researchers Sue NIH, Alleging Trump Administration Used Keyword List to Censor Grants

The lawsuit says the administration has used a list of 235 keywords—including “gender” and “racist”—to prevent topics from health equity to climate change from being funded. The NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.

Olga Akselrod, senior counsel in the ACLU’s Racial Justice Program, said the administration is “weaponizing federal research funding to suppress disfavored views, pressuring scientists to censor their work or risk losing funding for research that might produce results that don’t conform to the administration’s ideology.” She said NIH can make calls about what topics to fund but cannot do so inconsistently with governing statutes and regulations. “The First Amendment also ensures NIH cannot screen out projects or applicants because it thinks they’ll express views the government does not like. NIH has crossed each of these lines,” Akselrod said.

Ann Cohen, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, said in a press release that her Alzheimer’s disease study was designed to better understand how to identify and reduce dementia risk in communities at high risk of developing the disease that have been historically understudied. “For more than a decade, our team has built trusted relationships with communities that have too often been excluded from research, giving us critical information that can help improve early detection and treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, work that benefits everyone,” Cohen said. “Losing this funding has forced us to abruptly cancel appointments for participants, preventing them from receiving promised research results, and slowing or stopping critical data analysis. This puts years of trust and scientific progress at risk.”

Arghavan Salles, a surgeon and clinical associate professor at the Stanford University Department of Medicine, said her research for more than 15 years has focused on gender equity, sexual harassment and barriers that can push talented individuals out of science and medicine. “Now, I can no longer accurately describe my research because using words like ‘gender,’ ‘equity,’ or ‘sexual harassment’ would be flagged as inconsistent with NIH priorities,” Salles said. “Scientists should not have to scrub their research to receive federal funding, particularly after taxpayers have already invested years in supporting this work.”

Grants have historically been awarded through a scientific peer review process, moving forward sound proposals and providing a predictable path to stable, years-long funding. In 2025, the Trump administration began canceling thousands of grants across government, disrupting more than 5,700 at the NIH, according to Grant Witness. More than 4,500 have been restored.

The ACLU argues that the 235-keyword list is a “troubling” mechanism to identify, disrupt and terminate grants the government disagrees with, effectively adding a layer of ideological review to traditional scientific review. The suit seeks to cover all researchers whose grants have not otherwise been restored by court orders, as well as grants whose investigators have been forced to renegotiate, faced delays or denials.

The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.