The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has canceled hundreds of National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grants—worth over $350 million—funding projects related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and gender ideology, according to a department official.
The cuts included slashing projects studying ‘multilevel and multidimensional structural racism,’ ‘gender-affirming hormone therapy in mice’ and ‘microaggressions,’ among others.
In total, there were more than 500 research grants related to DEI and progressive gender ideology that the administration terminated.
‘HHS is taking action to terminate more than $350 million in research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities,’ HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in a statement. ‘The terminated research grants are simply wasteful in studying things that do not pertain to American’s health to any significant degree, including DEI and gender ideology. As we begin to Make America Healthy Again, it’s important to prioritize research that directly affects the health of Americans.’
One of the grants cut included nearly $1 million to scientists at the University of Maryland-Baltimore for a research project titled, ‘Assessing intersectional multilevel and multidimensional structural racism for English- and Spanish-speaking populations in the US.’ The project included work to create an ‘intersectional, multilevel, and multidimensional Structural Racism Measure’ in order to ‘eliminate health disparities and discrimination’ for racial minorities.
‘There is an urgent public health need to collect valid and reliable data on structural racism before effective interventions to reduce structural racism can be designed,’ the project’s description stated.
Multiple projects studying transgender medical treatments in mice were also among those cut. One of those grants provided close to $1 million to Emory University researchers to study how transgender hormone treatments impact the skeletal maturation of mice, titled, ‘Microbiome mediated effects of gender affirming hormone therapy in mice.’ Another project worth roughly $50,000 worked to understand ‘how chromosomal makeup and cross-sex hormone administration’ impacts wound healing in mice.
A separate research project that did not use mice got nearly $1 million ‘to study possible genomic associations with gender identity.’
Grants focused on recruiting scientists based on their race or ethnicity were also slashed by the Trump administration. A grant worth more than $5 million to researchers at Vanderbilt University Medical Center to help ‘achieve more racial and ethnic diversity among our scientific research faculty,’ included a commitment to hire at least 18 tenure-track faculty ‘from minoritized racial and ethnic groups.’
Soon after President Donald Trump was inaugurated, he directed federal agencies, including HHS, to temporarily freeze the issuance of new federal grants. The action was to ensure each agency’s funding was in compliance with Trump’s new policies and requirements, including those around getting rid of DEI and progressive gender ideology in the public sector.
A judge subsequently issued an order temporarily blocking the administration’s funding freeze, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded its memo directing the funding halt. A short time after that, the NIH resumed important meetings and travel associated with the agency’s grant-review process.
In addition to reviewing NIH’s grant funding to ensure it aligns with the president’s policies, Trump also implemented a 15% cap on facilities and administrative costs included in research grant awards.
The administration’s actions targeting NIH research have generated widespread backlash. Earlier this month, Trump’s pick to be the next NIH director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, was peppered with questions from Democrats during his confirmation hearing over whether he would step in to prevent the president from slashing what they deemed critically important research projects.
Bhattacharya would not explicitly say he disagreed with the cuts, or that, if confirmed, he would step in to stop them. Rather, he said he would ‘follow the law,’ while also investigating the impact of the cuts and ensuring every NIH researcher doing work that advances the health outcomes of Americans has the resources necessary to do their work.
Bhattacharya also laid out what he called a new, decentralized vision for future research at NIH that he said will be aimed at embracing dissenting ideas and transparency, while focusing on research topics that have the best chance at directly benefiting the health outcomes of Americans. Bhattacharya said that he wants to rid the agency’s research portfolio of other ‘frivolous’ efforts that he says do little to directly benefit health outcomes.
