In a 2025 Supreme Court shadow-docket ruling, Justice Neil Gorsuch's concurring opinion harshly criticized a veteran district judge, prompting backlash for its tone and implications for judicial hierarchy. The decision paused a lower court's block on the Trump administration's cancellation of NIH research grants. Legal analysts highlighted the opinion as emblematic of broader issues with the court's emergency procedures.
The Supreme Court's decision in NIH v. American Public Health Association, issued in August 2025, has been singled out as a low point of the year by legal commentators Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern on the Amicus podcast. The unsigned 5-4 order paused U.S. District Judge William Young's ruling, which had blocked the Trump administration from canceling thousands of National Institutes of Health grants. These grants supported research into suicide prevention, HIV transmission, Alzheimer's, and cardiovascular disease, with the administration citing promotion of DEI, "gender ideology," and COVID research as reasons for cancellation.
Judge Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee with 47 years on the bench, conducted a bench trial and issued a 103-page opinion mandating payment of the grants. A federal appeals court upheld this. However, the Supreme Court majority deemed Young's decision contradictory to its earlier April 2025 shadow-docket ruling in Department of Education v. California, which halted reinstatement of canceled education grants. The court directed plaintiffs to seek reimbursement via the Court of Federal Claims rather than under the Administrative Procedure Act, a path described as "obviously wrong and, as a practical matter, impossible much of the time."
Chief Justice John Roberts dissented in both cases, while Justice Elena Kagan criticized the California order as "at the least under-developed, and very possibly wrong." Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson's dissent noted: "Today’s decision reveals California’s considerable wingspan: That case’s ipse dixit now apparently governs all APA challenges to grant-funding determinations... A half paragraph of reasoning (issued without full briefing or any oral argument) thus suffices here to partially sustain the government’s abrupt cancellation of hundreds of millions of dollars allocated to support life-saving biomedical research."
The controversy peaked with Justice Neil Gorsuch's concurring opinion, joined by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, accusing Young of ignoring precedent. Gorsuch wrote: "Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them." He added: "This is now the third time in a matter of weeks this Court has had to intercede in a case squarely controlled by one of its precedents... All these interventions should have been unnecessary, but together they underscore a basic tenet of our judicial system: Whatever their own views, judges are duty-bound to respect the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress."
Lithwick called it "the single nastiest opinion of 2025," noting it prompted Young to apologize from the bench. Critics argued the tone exacerbates tensions amid threats to lower judges, highlighting flaws in the shadow docket's rushed, opaque process.
