“Where’s the support for that?” Young asked. “I see no evidence of that.”
Meanwhile, a lawyer representing one of the plaintiffs suing to block the grants, Kenneth Parreno, seemingly successfully argued that canceling grants related to race or transgender health were part of “a slapdash, harried effort to rubber stamp an ideological purge.” At the trial, Young noted that much of the information about the grant cancellations was only available due to the independent efforts of academics behind a project called Grant Watch, which was launched to crowdsource the monumental task of tracking the cuts.
According to Young, he felt “hesitant to draw this conclusion” but ultimately had “an unflinching obligation to draw it.”
Rebuking the cuts and ordering hundreds of grants restored, Young said “it is palpably clear that these directives and the set of terminated grants here also are designed to frustrate, to stop, research that may bear on the health—we’re talking about health here, the health of Americans, of our LGBTQ community. That’s appalling.
“You are bearing down on people of color because of their color,” Young said. “The Constitution will not permit that… Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?”
