As of March 31, at least 447 research grants (and counting) have been terminated from the National Institutes of Health, amounting to more than $2 billion in funding, as part of the anti-trans, anti-DEI attacks by the Trump administration.
The termination of these grants will soon lead to mass layoffs across academic institutions, the loss of funding and support for graduate students across the nation, and an end to transgender health research and other studies which include transgender people or anyone who the administration might see as falling under a gender identity or diversity, equality and inclusion category.
The Trump administration states that research studies that target or even just include transgender people or minorities are “antithetical to scientific inquiry, do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness,” and that “research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans.”
The truth is that prohibiting diversity in research and clinical trials is bad science. It impedes finding out whether different groups may experience disease or illness differently, or to a greater or lesser extent than other groups, and therefore should receive different treatments. Such studies have found, for example, that women can manifest heart attacks very differently than men and that type 2 diabetes is twice as high for Black people.
While the Trump administration’s attacks on DEI health research hurt everyone, they are frontal attacks on the health and wellbeing of Black people. A publicly available spreadsheet of terminated NIH grants documents the hundreds of grants cancelled simply for their focus on health disparities among Black and Latino populations.
Additionally, these direct attacks on transgender health research and health care can only further exacerbate long standing disparities in rates of suicide, depression, HIV acquisition, cancer treatment and more for this community.
It took a struggle to get oppressed communities into clinical trials
The administration’s argument that such research is economically wasteful and contributes little to enhancing the health and lives of many across the nation ignores the historic exclusion of oppressed communities, including Black, Latino and transgender people, from life-saving medical research. Inclusion of women, Black, Latino, LGBTQ and transgender people in clinical trials was the result of a long struggle beginning with the women’s movement of the 1970s. This fight resulted in Congress passing the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, requiring NIH funded grants to “insure that women and minorities are included in all clinical research.” It is also important to note that DEI research expanded after the 2020 murder of George Floyd and the rebellion for Black liberation.
These attacks on transgender and DEI health research are meant to con the pubic into believing the falsehood that billions of dollars are “wasted” on “minority” populations with no benefit to others. Racism and anti-trans bigotry is being to justify across-the-board cuts to key health research that impact everyone and to further dismantle an already fragmented and understaffed health care system.
For example, studies doing research into reducing rates of HIV and other STIs, which anyone can get, have been canceled if they include trans people as an additional risk group. Washington also eliminated a lab that assesses for drug resistance among bacterial sexually transmitted infections, also relevant to many adults, because they are especially prevalent in gay men.
Massive cuts to federal programs safeguarding health
This is part of a larger agenda to gut the budgets of all federal health institutions. Trump has laid off nearly 1,000 NIH workers, announced plans to terminate the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s HIV Prevention funding, and has begun layoffs of 10,000 workers at the CDC, the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid. The appointments of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as head of Health and Human Services and Dr. Mehmet Oz as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid pave the way to slash Medicare and Medicaid for millions of Americans.
A move towards privatization
Prior to the founding of the NIH and the post-World War II expansion of its funding, a majority of health research was funded by private industry and individual philanthropy. Today the federal government accounts for the majority of health research conducted across the nation. This was a progressive development that Trump now seeks to reverse.
The billionaire class’s end goal is not to redirect health research and health access to the majority of working class people or to eradicate wasteful spending. Its goal is to privatize Medicare, Medicaid, health research and dismantle federal institutions benefiting working people, like the NIH, in order to redirect public wealth for their own private profit.
What is needed is full public funding of health care, with health care a guaranteed right for all; an increase in funding for research into every health issue that affects the working class including transgender people, Black people, Latinos, women and all specially oppressed communities.
Scientists, who do not usually engage in protests and mass demonstrations, are beginning to organize across the nation in demonstrations calling for everyone to “stand up for science.” The time is now to continue these demonstrations, connect these attacks on scientific research and health care with the larger assault on basic democratic rights, as well as the brutal attacks on anyone in solidarity with Palestine, and to build a mass movement that can win a new society that prioritizes people over profit.
Feature photo: An investigator engaged in research at an NIH lab. Credit: National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, NIH (CC BY-NC 2.0)
