John Roberts Is a Threat to the Health of Every American

Alot of attention has been paid to the Trump administration’s assault on public health and science over the past 10 months. Members of Trump’s administration past and present, from Elon Musk at DOGE, to Russell Vought at the Office of Management and Budget, RFK Jr. at Health and Human Services, and functionaries like Jay Bhattacharya at the National Institutes of Health and Marty Makary at the Food and Drug Administration, have rightly been criticized for their scorched-earth decimation of federal agencies, hobbling much of our capacity to keep public health and science moving forward in this country. We’ve also seen a hefty amount of opprobrium thrown at the GOP-led Congress, which has either rolled over and played dead or cheered the administration along. The only bright spot has been the unwillingness of the Democrats thus far to give the administration a blank check through a clean continuing resolution, explicitly targeting the impoundment of already appropriated funds as a demand in negotiations to end the government shutdown.

But there is one man who has escaped blame for all that has been happening to public health and science, and who has received more than a certain amount of deference by virtue of his position since the beginning of this administration: Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts. In many ways, Roberts is the key enabler of the carnage we’ve seen roll out across the nation through his own deference to this president. In fact, he is more than an enabler—all he does regularly sends a signal to this administration: Keep going, we will not stop you.

True, there have been broader criticisms of the Roberts court, with federal judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans warning of a judicial crisis. Some commentators have also been speaking out, such as Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo, who wrote in March:

We are living in a moment in which the system of legal, interpretive legitimacy has fatally broken down. It’s been in its death throes for a decade. Now it’s no longer operating at all. That throne is empty of anything that commands our allegiance or claims to legitimacy.

Caleb Nelson, Clarence Thomas’s former clerk and a professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law, a respected conservative scholar, sounded the alarm in late September, warning that

a President bent on vengeful, destructive, and lawless behavior can do lasting damage to our norms and institutions. As one member of Congress argued in 1789, we should not gravitate toward interpretations of the Constitution that “legaliz[e] the full exertion of a tyrannical disposition.”

But I want to talk more specifically about how Roberts and his cronies on the bench are waging a political war on the health and well-being of all Americans, on scientific innovation and discovery—because that is indeed what they are doing. I don’t care if it’s a byproduct or collateral damage of their “judicial philosophies.” The effect is the same: mobilizing power to destroy the federal government and, with it, people’s lives. This is Roberts’s and his court’s legacy.

First, through the emergency docket, Roberts and his court, on three separate occasions, have blocked lower-court rulings to rescind “reductions in force,” or staff terminations across the federal government by the Trump administration. This means thousands of employees at federal agencies responsible for public health and science are now “RIF-ed.” The magnitude of the loss here, with whole departments and divisions hollowed out, has left the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in tatters, while other agencies limp along trying to keep basic functions (e.g., grant administration) moving ahead. While some federal judges have suggested that the firings are an illegal usurpation of authority by the executive branch, the Supreme Court has lifted temporary restraining orders, sending the cases back down to the lower courts. By the time these cases are decided, the damage will have been done, irreversible and long-lasting. Roberts knows what he is doing and it has nothing to do with following the law: It’s part of a long-standing conservative political goal to bring the administrative state to its knees. We are used to a death by a thousand cuts, but this is swinging the axe to the neck of agencies in one full, decisive blow. And where is John Roberts? At the side of the executioner, clapping slowly.

Another case. In Massachusetts, this past summer, in a federal district court, Judge William G. Young, appointed decades ago by Ronald Reagan, struck down the National Institutes of Health’s termination of hundreds of research grants, ruling that the NIH acted arbitrarily and capriciously, did not follow proper procedures, and based terminations on racial and LGBTQ+ animus, stating, “I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable.” But any celebration by researchers was short-lived as, you guessed it, as a few weeks later, the Roberts court sided with the Trump administration on appeal, suggesting that the district court did not have jurisdiction in this case and that if the researchers wanted their grants back, they’d have to go to the Court of Federal Claims. Once again, the sophistry of the court has real implications: The work in laboratories isn’t something you can switch on and off, particularly after months or even years of an appeals process. While NIH offered a reprieve to many grants in this case, thousands more still remain terminated.

However, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was not having it. Rebuking Roberts’s court, she said in her dissent:

In a broader sense, however, today’s ruling is of a piece with this Court’s recent tendencies. “[R]ight when the Judiciary should be hunkering down to do all it can to preserve the law’s constraints,” the Court opts instead to make vindicating the rule of law and preventing manifestly injurious Government action as difficult as possible. Id., at ___ (JACKSON, J., dissenting) (slip op., at 21). This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist. Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.

Calvinball. This administration always wins. This is Roberts’s guiding principle: a deeply partisan commitment to this administration, no matter the cost to the reputation of the court or the real impact on human lives and health. And yes, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas also deserve the blame here for letting the Trump administration “go wild” on public health and scientific research, but Roberts is the architect here and “this is the presidency John Roberts has built.” This aspect of Roberts’s legacy should never be forgotten—it will have short- and long-term impacts on millions of lives. We should remember that the Supreme Court could stop much of this, simply by allowing lower court orders to stand, but Roberts and his cronies will not relent. And they couldn’t care less if they suffer rebukes by their colleagues on the left and right among sitting judges, or if their standing among the American public sinks to new lows. This is the behavior of fanatics. Dangerous ones, at that.