The faces of the NIH cuts
What sort of research is being slashed?
Tomorrow, my colleague Kenneth Parreno and our co-counsel will argue a motion for a preliminary injunction in our lawsuit against the Trump administration for illegally cancelling hundreds of National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grants on topics and communities that the White House dislikes. Protect Democracy, along with the ACLU, ACLU of Massachusetts, and the Center for Science in the Public Interest filed a lawsuit on behalf of the American Public Health Association, the UAW, Ibis Reproductive Health, and individual researchers against NIH and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for terminating about $3 billion in NIH grant funding — research that includes LGBTQ individuals, women, and people of color; that seeks to understand the reasons for disparities in health outcomes; and that investigates the causes of vaccine hesitancy, among other disfavored topics.
If you want to listen in to Wednesday’s hearing, you can do so by signing up through the District of Massachusetts website. The hearing, scheduled for 11 a.m. EDT before Senior District Judge William G. Young (Case No. 1:25-CV-10787), is accessible by audio. To request access, navigate to the registration page and enter your information to receive a Zoom link to join the hearing.
We argue that it’s illegal and unconstitutional for the administration to arbitrarily cancel research funding like this.
In short, they are breaking the law in two fundamental ways:
The Administrative Procedure Act. In making its arbitrary and capricious decision to cancel hundreds of grants based on a political agenda apparently directed by the president (cut anything on alleged DEI, transgender issues, or vaccine hesitancy) with zero scientific input, the NIH did not even try to explain why a change in medical research priorities was justified.
Constitutional violations. The cancellations are unconstitutionally vague. Researchers cannot decipher how they would need to modify their research studies to satisfy the new priorities going forward. Further, the grant cancellations violate constitutional separation of powers principles because they seek to override requirements on NIH mandated by Congress.
Yet this isn’t just a lawsuit about legal and constitutional principles. There’s important science on the line — research that, if these cuts are allowed to stand, will never see the light of day.
The White House likely wants you to believe that they’re not targeting anything important, that it’s just “woke ideology” and other topics they dislike.
Here are four of the plaintiffs and members of plaintiff organizations and their research. Judge for yourself if this science seems important.
Brittany Charlton, Epidemiology, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
LGBTQ young people in the United States are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide compared to their peers. They are significantly more at risk for anxiety and depression.
Alongside cancer disparities and reproductive health, Dr. Charlton studies how to improve mental health for young LGBTQ people in the context of a growing wave of anti-LGBTQ legislation in states across the country.
She wrote about what it means to have her research grants cut in an op-ed in The Hill: I’m a scientist — here’s why I’m suing RFK Jr.
The emails at the top of my inbox filled me with dread. They came from the National Institutes of Health, and they put years of scientific research at risk.
When I opened those emails on a Friday evening in March, I found that the NIH had cancelled all my research grants, effective immediately, because they focused on gay, lesbian and transgender health. The agency described my research as “antithetical to the scientific inquiry.”
Let me set the record straight: I’m not promoting radical ideology, woke ideology, gender ideology or any kind of ideology at all. I’m a scientist. I work to keep people healthy.
[Read the whole article.]
Nicole (Nikki) Maphis, Neuroscience, University of New Mexico
Alzheimer’s is the most expensive disease in the United States, costing $305 billion in 2020 and estimated to reach more than $1 trillion as the population ages. As many as one in five Americans will get Alzheimer's.
Dr. Maphis studies how alcohol impacts Alzheimer's risk — and how it can worsen its effects. (The majority of Alzheimer’s cases cannot be traced to genetics; that makes understanding risk factors like alcohol a critical scientific frontier.)
Her NIH funding for both professional development and technical training on mice studies — implanting wires in mice brains to record neuronal electrical activity, infusing chemicals to alter brain activity, and performing experiments to induce alcohol dependence — was arbitrarily removed from the grant review panel and never considered for funding. As Maphis writes in her editorial in the Albuquerque Journal:
There were no reasons given/nor no explanations provided to me. Why am I not being given comments? How will I make this proposal better? Should I try again?
Am I being penalized because I used a diversity mechanism?
[Read the whole article.]
Maphis had applied to the Maximizing Opportunities for Scientific and Academic Independent Careers (MOSAIC) program, which aimed to expand the pipeline for young and promising researchers from disadvantaged backgrounds. The entire program was completely and arbitrarily cut despite — and arguably because of — congressional mandates requiring that NIH fund recruitment and training programs to diversify the fields of biomedical and behavioral research, regardless of that research’s goals.
Maphis, the first in her low-income family to graduate college, applied. Now, she isn’t even entirely sure she can stay on this career path to do this work — or to mentor the next generation of scientists.
Peter Lurie, President and Executive Director, Center for Science in the Public Interest
In the 1980s, an HIV diagnosis was often a death sentence. Today, with treatment, people with the disease can expect to live long and relatively unimpacted lives.
Throughout those years of remarkable scientific accomplishment, Dr. Lurie has studied various aspects of HIV treatment and response — ranging from needle exchanges and foreign aid to HIV vaccine trials. Over the course of his decades-long career, he has worked with universities and government agencies alike — from the National Institute of Drug Abuse to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration — to understand the scope of the epidemic and advance new treatments.
His ongoing research funding on a grant where he serves as an advisor and consultant, which was arbitrarily cancelled by NIH, supported a likely first-of-its-kind study focused on over-the-counter access to PrEP — the pre-exposure prophylaxis use of anti-HIV drugs that has transformed the fight against HIV transmission since its introduction in 2012.
Despite Lurie’s research planning to assess PrEP’s impact on all patients, its mention of particularly vulnerable groups such as queer men and transgender women ran afoul of edicts against so-called “gender identity.” Apparently, to the administration, that was grounds for termination.
Katie Edwards, Social Work, University of Michigan
Studies suggest that one in six American women and one in 33 American men are the victim of sexual assault in their lifetimes. Rates are even higher among LGBTQ+ youth and youth of color.
Dr. Edwards studies how to prevent sexual violence. Her research looks at the causes and contexts of sexual assault to better develop interventions to both prevent sexual assault and to support survivors.
This grant from the NIH (one of six grants supporting Edwards’ research that the agency terminated) specifically looked at an understudied question: What factors increase risk for sexual assault among sexual minority men and how can we best support sexual minority men survivors of sexual assault? The research hoped to develop more effective interventions for that group — but apparently ran afoul of the White House’s agenda.
Edwards wrote about her experience having her research terminated in an op-ed in The Huffington Post: The Trump administration just made catastrophic cuts that will affect you or someone you know.
Even if you do not know it, you likely have been touched in a positive way by public health research, or someone you know likely has been. If you or someone you love has received preventative care or treatment for cancer or mental health conditions, there is a good chance that it was informed directly or indirectly by NIH-funded research. These studies are now in grave danger.
I encourage each person reading this essay to visit NIH Reporter. Type in something you or a loved one has struggled with — depression, suicide, cancer, diabetes, drug abuse, alcoholism, trauma — and read about the life-saving work happening across the U.S.
[Read the whole article.]
Science is not just an academic pursuit. From medicine to public health to engineering to technology to public policy, scientific discoveries and innovations quite literally shape the world around us.
Science saves lives.
The politicization of NIH funding is not only illegal — it’s a threat to real research and real people, and not just the already-vulnerable communities that the administration has repeatedly scapegoated. The directives that triggered these cuts (and the cuts themselves) must be reversed.
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