Thursday, the Supreme Court announced its opinion in National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association. The case involved the fate of approximately $783 million in NIH research grants that were tied to DEI initiatives rather than to general scientific research. By a 5-4 vote, the court ruled that a single federal judge could not compel the federal government to spend nearly $1 billion on nonsensical pseudo-research it no longer wished to fund.

This case may ultimately prove more important than the money it saved because it indicated the Supreme Court was losing patience with inferior courts and with one of its members.

Neil Gorsuch used a concurring opinion that effectively read the Riot Act to lower courts.

Lower court judges may sometimes disagree with this Court’s decisions, but they are never free to defy them.  In Department of Ed. v. California, 604 U. S. ___ (2025) (per curiam), this Court granted a stay because it found the government likely to prevail in showing that the district court lacked jurisdiction to order the government to pay grant obligations. California explained that “suits based on ‘any express or implied contract with the United States’” do not belong in district court under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), but in the Court of Federal Claims under the Tucker Act. Id., at ___ (slip op., at 2) (quoting 28 U. S. C. §1491(a)(1)).  Rather than follow that direction, the district court in this case permitted a suit involving materially identical grants to proceed to final judgment under the APA. As support for its course, the district court invoked the “persuasive authority” of “the dissent[s] in California” and an earlier court of appeals decision California repudiated. Massachusetts v. Kennedy, ___ F. Supp. 3d ___, ___ (Mass. 2025), App. to Application 232a (App.).  That was error. “[U]nless we wish anarchy to prevail within the federal judicial system, a precedent of this Court must be followed by the lower federal courts no matter how misguided the judges of those courts may think it to be.”  Hutto v. Davis, 454 U. S. 370, 375 (1982) (per curiam).

He concluded with this summary:

If the district court’s failure to abide by California were a one-off, perhaps it would not be worth writing to address it. But two months ago another district court tried to “compel compliance” with a different “order that this Court ha[d] stayed.” Department of Homeland Security v. D. V. D., 606 U. S. ___, ___ (2025) (KAGAN, J., concurring) (slip op., at 1).  Still another district court recently diverged from one of this Court’s decisions even though the case at hand did not differ “in any pertinent respect” from the one this Court had decided. Boyle, 606 U. S., at ___ (slip op., at 1). So 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.  Ibid. 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.”  Hutto, 454 U. S., at 375.