What's motivating the termination of $701 million in NIH grants?
the answers will not shock you: viewpoint punishment, queerphobia, racism, and vaccine denial
Starting in late February, the NIH (under the new Trump regime) started doing something unusual: terminating active grants to academic scientists. These grants had already been awarded, but the new administration decided to stop future grant payments. As more information surfaced about the specific awards terminated, a trend emerged: targeted grants included now-verboten language and ideas about promoting health equity, especially among gender diverse and racially diverse members of American society.
To be clear, this intellectual censorship is separate from the ongoing censorship of research produced by researchers directly employed by the federal government, like those at the CDC which I have written about previously.
As February turned into March, the rate of grant terminations increased. As of this writing, nearly $701 million in NIH grants have been terminated. I perused the 392 grants terminated thus far (also available here with additional details for each grant) to gauge the putative reason that each grant was terminated.
In short, there are four major reasons that grants have been targeted, each due to problematic ideologies held by those in the Trump administration: punishing student speech, queerphobia, racism, and vaccine denial. For some grants, these ideologies intersected such that more than one contributed to its termination. The total values of terminated funds per ideological motivator is shown in the Venn diagram below. I then discuss each motivation individually and provide examples of terminated projects.
Punishing student speech ($461 million): Nearly two-thirds of the value of terminated grants have been inflicted upon a single institution: Columbia University. The federal government has provided a clear rationale for doing so: retaliation for Columbia students’ exercise of free speech during protests for Palestinian lives. Every person should be able to appreciate just how big of a rights violation this move is - punishing an institution for student speech. This is clearly an attempt to force compliance with Zionism. (I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the way in which international researchers’ speech in support for Palestine has been targeted through the termination of green cards and visas with intent to deport. This phenomenon is nationwide, unlike the precise targeting of Columbia for grant termination.) Of the canceled grants, many overlap with the next two motivations, but the move at Columbia is particularly unprecedented and specific (which is why I have coded these grants separately from the rest). For its part, Columbia has succumbed to demands from the Trump Administration to further crack down on student speech moving forward. These concessions are supposedly in a bid to restore the terminated grants, but as of this writing the terminations remain in place. Examples of terminated grants include:
“Subtyping sepsis in Uganda using clinical, pathogen, and host response profiling”
“The impact of Alzheimer's disease on novel genetic signatures of hippocampal memory traces”
“Automated Digital Imaging for Cervical Cancer Screening”
Queerphobia ($171 million): The next largest source of terminated grant value is due to a total censorship of queer issues - a major flank of the administration’s assault on science. Importantly, these grants are not limited to studies on trans and gender diverse people. Grants supporting studies of HIV and the health of “men who have sex with men” have also been cut off. Anything remotely related to the LGBTQIA2S+ community has become a target. Examples of terminated grants include:
“Violence and viral suppression among men living with HIV”
“Examining Health Comorbidities and Healthcare Utilization Disparities among Older Transgender and Cisgender Adults in the U.S.”
“Impact of Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy on HIV Viral Dynamics and Immune Responses in Transgender Women”
Racism ($89 million): These grants include work being done to promote health equity among people of color. Many of these grants focus on a specific racial minority, but some are generally aiming to promote “equity.” I have lumped these two groups together because the administration’s attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion are a racist dogwhistle. Examples of terminated grants include:
“Structural Racism as a ‘Third hit’ on kidney outcomes of Black individuals with APOL1 risk alleles”
“Intervention to Enhance PrEP Persistence Among African American Men Who Have Sex With Men”
“Mental Health Risk and Resilience among Latinx SGM Adolescents and their Parents”
Vaccine denialism ($11 million): As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ultimately oversees the NIH. It’s surely no coincidence, then, that grants seeking to study vaccine efficacy and vaccine hesitancy have also been targeted. Examples of terminated grants include:
“Modeling Adolescent Health Care Decision-Making for Vaccines: A Community- Based Participatory Approach”
“Uptake, Safety and Effectiveness of COVID-19 Vaccines during Pregnancy”
“Reducing Vaccine Hesitancy among Hispanic Parents of COVID-19 Vaccine-Eligible Children”
Last, I have not included the ~$175 million in grants to the University of Pennsylvania which was put “on pause” because the university allowed trans swimmer Lia Thomas to compete in 2022 (in compliance with NCAA regulations at the time). Given the regime’s success in getting Columbia to bend the knee, I would not be surprised if Penn makes concessions to get this funding restored.
Whew, that was a lot! It should be noted that these numbers are only going to increase as the administration targets additional research projects. Depending on how much worse it gets, I may provide an update in a few weeks.
But in the meantime, I renew my call on those in science to unequivocally stand against this blatant censorship. These heinous actions will cause direct harm not just to the scientists who work on these unfunded projects but also the minoritized people whose health these research projects were meant to preserve. We must not lose sight of the mounting human toll levied by the Trump regime’s censorship of science.
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