This is Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist,” Justice Jackson said in dissent. “Calvinball has only one rule: There are no fixed rules. We seem to have two: that one, and this administration always wins.

A federal judge had ruled that the more than $1 billion in cuts to research grants, like studies into HIV prevention, violated federal law.

The decision could result in the loss of National Institutes of Health grants worth hundreds of millions of dollars.