If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?). So I read it as an agreement to an interpretation that doing those things would violate the law.
> If it was simply an agreement that the recipient won’t violate Federal law, it wouldn’t need to be stated (how could the intention be otherwise?).
Statements about not breaking specific existing laws are common in government contracts in the US (at all levels), functionally, they make violating the law a breach of contract. This enables the government to declare a breach and cancel the contract without the litigation that would be required for even a civil penalty for breaking the law, forcing the contractor to litigate for breach of contract (claiming that they did not breach the contract so that the government cancellation was itself a breach) instead.
Using a fantasy (“discriminatory equity ideology”) with an initialism collision with a common inclusivity practice (DEI), combined with recent practice by the same Administration, is clearly a signal of where the government intends to apply the guilty-until-proven-innocent approach in this case.
Yes, that’s what I meant, stated more clearly. The contract is spelling out behavior that both sides agree up front that they consider a violation of the law, so you can’t claim that you didn’t think you were breaching the contract because you didn’t think you were violating the law.
Or more specifically a warning that the administration intends to interpret the law in that manner, whether it is true or not. PSF could easily spend more than $1.5M in a lawsuit to challenge that interpretation if their grant was clawed back, so financially it isn't worth taking the money.
Does the DOJ or PSF have more money for lawyers? If the answer isn’t the latter, the PSF is quite reasonably concluding that regardless of how a fair court might rule it would be financially perilous to attempt to stick up for the law, especially when a Republican supreme court has a fair chance of inventing another pretext for denying victory or allowing maximal harm to be done before acknowledging the law.
No. I was just pointing out that your downplaying of the risks in this thread is too cavalier: I believe they think, as do I, that even the cost of testing the legality of a particular interpretation would be crushing for a small non-profit.
If your point is that corporate lawyers tend to see monsters behind every blade of grass, I agree. This is what they are paid to do. If I am a cavalier, it is to calm this community, to point out that they are over-indexed on this language and that it is the courts jurisdiction to decide what is meant.
There is no language that will magically prevent a government from canceling a grant and requiring a grantee to pursue relief from the court. This type of guarantee does not exist.
The GP's point is that it puts recipients in the position of having to argue that something they agreed to is invalid. This presumably places a higher burden of proof on the company.
In the absence of such a statement, the first claim would need to be "the DEI program your company runs is against federal law", which could then be tested in the courts.
> The GP's point is that it puts recipients in the position of having to argue that something they agreed to is invalid. This presumably places a higher burden of proof on the company.
Understood; while I disagree with the GP's point, I do appreciate your response.
I don't believe such example clauses raise the threshold for the defense against a claim given that there could be practically unlimited number of such examples. I don't believe that any such example so highlighted creates an effective higher priority than any other possible example under 14th amendment equal protection grounds.
