The Trump administration is still prohibiting National Institutes of Health (NIH) staff from issuing virtually all grant funding, an NIH official tells Popular Information. The ongoing funding freeze is also reflected in internal correspondence reviewed by Popular Information and was reiterated to staff in a meeting on Monday. The funding freeze at NIH violates two federal court injunctions, two legal experts said.
The funding freeze at NIH puts all of the research the agency funds at risk. As the primary funder of biomedical research in the United States, NIH-funded research includes everything from cancer treatments to heart disease prevention to stroke interventions.
They all hope for/assume/were promised full pardons.
Pardons would only help with criminal contempt charges. In this case, the judge would probably be applying civil contempt to compel compliance with the court order. Since they wouldn’t be held on a criminal charge, pardoning the crime wouldn’t get them released.
And have historically gotten them too.
True but it at least requires them to go through that process and can still inconvenience and intimidate people. Trump is capricious and unpredictable and there may be uncertainty as to whether such pardons will be granted, and even if they are, people could be arrested in the meantime.
If there is a way to nail them with state charges then this would get around this although I would assume most of these activities primarily violate federal law and take place in the District which does not have the independence of a state, unfortunately.
I believe there can’t be state charges in this because that would imply a state court ordering a federal agency to do something which i believe is more or less impossible due to the Supremacy Clause.
But the capricious nature of Deputy Assistant President Trump is a real danger to these people, especially if whatever illegal thing they’re doing for him gets big bad publicity and could make him unpopular.
Federal officials can still be subject to state charges if they break state law. It’s not a matter of ordering a federal agency to do anything, so the supremacy clause should not be relevant here. The question is what state laws could they be breaking? There may not be any.