Existing grants and legal challenges

27:13what's currently happening in terms of OM trying to change the process. But the administration that's currently in the White House has already terminated and suspended several existing grants that were appropriated by Congress last year. >> Yeah. >> So, Congress decided where the money went. It was it's law. It's not like an opinion. And the White House has begun to say even for either programs that have yet to receive allocations or some programs that have received their first batch but not the second to say, "Hey, this is you're not getting any more money." >> Yeah. >> Something you may or may not have some

27:55context for. >> Oh, yeah. I mean, I have several friends in the university ecosystem that are very worried about their future and their present scientific endeavors, right? like they're they're they're in the middle of science projects that they're and they have a few experiments left before they publish the big paper in nature and science and cell and all this other stuff and yeah all of a sudden the grant funding is gone and you haven't quite finished the story what do you do right it's it's really tragic so as we have two sides of the story here there's the proposal that's happening but there's action that have already been being taken since January

28:37of last year. And on July 17th, a federal judge ruled that agencies cannot use newly adopted political or pragmatic priorities to retroactively cancel grants under different criteria. So if in 2025, Congress appropriated money based on the national priorities at the time and then in 2026 a new administration comes in and says we don't want to do that anymore, it you can't do that. Right? So that's um you know been established in federal court. Now a caveat to that is the government may retain legitimate authority to terminate grants which will can still continue to be challenged. But the

29:18judge's central point was that it cannot change the rules after an award has already been made >> which is where we get the proposal language which says they can involve themselves prior to the awards being distributed. This has continued where the department of health and human services notified 70 researchers funded by the agency of healthcare and research quality that their projects would not receive their next annual funding installments. So this is not even just in things like physics and biology. This is also impacting health research studies. Those projects represented approximately $185 million in multi-year commitments. And so they've already received a distribution and they're saying you're

29:59getting no more money. >> Yeah. >> Even though they've already received the money for it. And what they're trying to do now as the legal battle has continued is change the language about what it is that they're doing. So HHS said the grants were not technically terminated. They were simply not awarded continued funding because it's a multi. So rather than saying we're terminating funding for something that is a single allocation, they're saying, "Oh, this was a multi-year uh thing and we're we're discontinuing the continued funding of what is a multi-year install." >> That doesn't make any sense. [laughter] >> Are you serious? So it's basically

30:40termination under a different name. termination but >> they're trying to just voodoo magic. >> They're saying they're not terminating, they're just discontinuing. >> Right. Right. Which >> I'm not the the the source, but they may be uh synonyms in this context. >> Yeah. >> Um >> and this is so this is both a constitutional and budgetary dispute that that's important. So, Congress does not vote on individual research projects. Right. Right. It just appropriates money to an agency. >> That agency chooses individual grants. Multi-year grants may also receive their funding in annual installments rather than all at once. So you could have a program that gets a $50 million allocation in 2025, but it's spread over four years. >> Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of the like some of the grants that I was supported

31:22during my PhD were these multi-year grants where like my adviser or like the collaboration that I was a part of would get money every year, right? You don't get a lump sum. And so the debate is really around like the executive branch doesn't have unlimited discretion to decide their role in again managing the rules and distribution. It's an administrative rule. It's never been that way. >> It's not a discretionary rule. And this is this is a very very contentious issue right now. So the central debate dispute is whether the administration is simply managing the the congressional funded programs or whether replacing Congress's priorities has you know their own right to do like

32:05if they have their own right to basically displace what Congress has already decided to do. And the last note here before we wrap up on this is there's sort of three different fronts that this battle is being fought over. So OM office of office of management and