So many times a court ruling will come down similar to this, where the judge, in correctly and impartially analyzing the situation, deems that whatever the plaintiff is seeking cannot be granted due to jurisdiction or some other basically administrative problem, but the mass media reports on in it in a way that makes it seem like it was because they thought the plaintiff “unworthy.”
I had a civil procedure professor once explain various federal court procedures in terms of the flow of cases through pipelines, and an evidence professor who explained the rules of evidence in terms of Bayesian statistics. But if you’re smart enough to understand that, you can make a lot more money doing something other than being a reporter.
And if you're smart enough to convey it to laymen in a useful way you're making money hand over fist doing something better still.
As such, it is correct, but not impartial. They can choose their personal opinion and then retroactively find the justification.
literally it would be breaking the law for this judge to adjudicate this case. That’s not judicial bias or finding a way to weasel out (as is done all the time with “standing”).
The reason Trump has been winning so much at the Supreme Court is because these lower courts have been breaking all the rules in their efforts to stop him. They keep getting struck down for breaking the rules.
The Trump administration has won exactly two cases at SCOTUS, which is Trump vs CASA and United States vs Skrmetti.
Every other "positive outcome" from SCOTUS has been the Supreme Court reaching down into lower court decisions and delaying/pausing lower courts' decisions in lieu of the Supreme Court actually hearing and deciding the case.
And in a growing number of these cases, there has been zero rationale provided for the reversal. None whatsoever. You cannot possibly make the claim they were for "breaking the rules." In fact, with the (very aberrational) lack of provided rationale, I'd suggest you can infer quite the opposite: SCOTUS's interventions are actually not readily defensible with any cogent legal argument.
In other words, you are a victim of the same ignorance discussed at the top of the thread. Trump's wins are not wins, they are SCOTUS using procedural tools to overturn lower decisions without having to hear evidence, consider arguments, or provide decisions themselves.
These grants are the water, sun and food for all the PhDs in the US. We will now see the world flocking to Asia and Europe as the center of research.
Not just PhDs. R&D in general.
The big secret is the US government has been subsidizing corporate R&D for 70 years and people seem to have forgotten that fact.
2215554 EDU Pacific Resources for Education and Learning Investigating the impact of youth's inductive exploration of local technologies featured in Indigenous stories on their engagement, self-efficacy, and persistence in STEM $2,683,413
and mixed with it are specifically Harvard's grants for about everything, not even DEI related. like:
2426105 BIO Harvard University Understanding within-cell plasmid evolution with synthetic systems $1,100,000
Is this related to the Trump-Harvard beef?
eli_gottlieb•4mo ago
Bit on the nose that American law does not seem to consider mass layoffs and the indefinite downsizing of an entire industry to be irreparable harm to those affected.
kolbe•4mo ago
davidw•4mo ago
My wife works in science and is seeing some of the effects of all this, and it's going to be a generational hit to research and development in this country.
If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry.
philipallstar•4mo ago
Science isn't the plaintiff.
> If the Europeans were smart and faster moving they would have large scale programs to hire up people and move them over there, because there are tons of brilliant people doing important work that are being left high and dry.
Science often requires a lot of money, and generally Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
vlovich123•4mo ago
But scientists are and science is the industry that is being harmed.
> Europe would rather wait for America to spend the money and make the discoveries while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
And so now we’re not spending the money on discoveries and also cutting back on the social “niceties” we had spent whatever little amount of money on?
philipallstar•4mo ago
The US has been spending the most globally, in real terms per capita[0] and a percentage of GDP[1] on healthcare for a long time. How on earth can you justify the phrase "little amount of money"?
The problem wasn't the amount spent. The problem was the terrible hybrid of regulations that let the private sector down crazy rabbit-holes of false value to chase and be paid for, instead of just direct exposure to the real health market's needs.
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.PC.CD?end=2...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.CHEX.GD.ZS?most_... (technically three massively smaller economies contribute more as a % of GDP, but that's off a crazily lower base)
vlovich123•4mo ago
> while laughing at them for not spending the money on social niceties.
The US government doesn't pay for the "social nicety" of health care & in fact makes more money since that dues to private insurance industry generates even more tax revenue.
You can claim it's the regulations but all evidence I've read suggests it's the lack of single-payer system which removes the ability to negotiate + increases the complexity of the system because as a provider you have to pay more people to manage insurance payments with all the different providers vs 1 central provider.
rayiner•4mo ago
But the law doesn’t afford scientists any right to sue on the basis that they think the administration’s policy is bad for science writ large. That’s a policy determination outside the power of the courts to second guess. (Read *Marbury v. Madison and specifically the parts talking about ministerial actions. Courts can only enjoin executive officials to take ministerial actions the law clearly requires, not second guess the executive’s discretionary decisions.)
The actual legal rights the scientists can exercise are similar to those of any government contractor. If you have a contract to run a hotdog stand on a military base, the government has certain limitations on what it can and can’t do.
flir•4mo ago
*eyeroll*
jltsiren•4mo ago
But research funding is mostly used for hiring early-career researchers for fixed-term positions. If Europe wants to attract foreign academic talent, its universities need permanent increases in core funding for hiring additional faculty. And that's something European politicians largely don't support.
insane_dreamer•4mo ago
noobermin•4mo ago
mattlutze•4mo ago
The impending harm here is explicit, immediate, and as demonstrated previously serious for these labs and research fields. It's unfortunate that Judge Cobb didn't find this to be sufficient, but hopefully on appeals some relief may be offered.
Temporary loss of income is I think not generally a basis for irreparable harm for more or less the argument you hint at.
dataflow•4mo ago
Experiments expiring seems like a more compelling argument than knowledge moving elsewhere. The theory behind irreparable seems to be "it can't be fixed with money," not "you don't have enough money to fix it." If someone goes to a competitor then presumably there is an amount of money that would bring them back - it just might be out of your reach.
roxolotl•4mo ago
It’s not that extreme for someone to go from job loss to losing most everything else over the course of 6 to 12 months because there’s little to no safety net.
SoftTalker•4mo ago
kolbe•4mo ago
It is 100% clear that, yes, there is harm being done. It's not at all clear that the harm is irreparable. They usually apply the term to things that are actually irreparable like the death penalty (can't resuscitate the dead person).
dmoy•4mo ago
So losing a grant is probably more along those lines, in the context of "irreparable harm" for an injunction.
You could make the argument (and I'm guessing it was?) that for scientific grants specifically, if the goal isn't money in the first place, and the lack of grant makes a scientific career impossible to fix later even with any amount of money (say grants 10x as large), then maybe you meet "irreparable harm"? I don't know if the courts would buy that.
prasadjoglekar•4mo ago
NoMoreNicksLeft•4mo ago
SpicyLemonZest•4mo ago
In this case, the law does give the executive some discretion to decide based on their priorities whether they really owe you $1000, but the plaintiffs argue the NSF has exceeded that discretion.
dmoy•4mo ago
Right, exactly. And that seems to be exactly how the court ruled on this injunction. Since "just money" typically can't reach the bar of "irreparable harm", then an injunction that requires meeting the bar of "irreparable harm" is not granted.
The case itself still proceeds, there's just not an immediate injunction granted while the (slow as hell) court proceedings continue.
jfengel•4mo ago
Justice delayed is justice denied.
dmoy•4mo ago
Money is typically not.
jfengel•4mo ago
If destroy a department, money does not bring it back to life. It disposes of its materials, disperses its personnel, and loses its laboratory. Unless somebody volunteers to keep your data, it gets lost.
And if you're working in biology, samples and research animals will be literally dead.
It is "irreparable harm" in the legal sense.
dmoy•4mo ago
Doesn't look like the court agreed though
jfengel•4mo ago
Perhaps you could explain one more thing for me. How did the filing lawyer make such a (seemingly) elementary mistake? Why wasn't it caught earlier (by the judge, by their colleagues, by anybody with an interest in this case)?
eli_gottlieb•4mo ago
I think I'd agree with that, yes. I'd even go as far as to argue that you've caused irreparable harm to the public insofar as the grants specifically would have funded open-access publications.
rayiner•4mo ago
More generally, in American law, a claim for money is quintessentially something that cannot be the basis for “irreparable harm” to support a preliminary injunction. The law presumes that, where the claim is for money, the injury can virtually always be redressed by a payment of money once the case has been fully decided.