As the Trump administration cuts and transforms At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), minority health researchers are trying to maintain funding without crossing the gray line in “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) projects.
Researchers told The Hill that they face unclear research directions, increasingly competitive grant awards and politicized peer review processes as they struggle to maintain their work improving health outcomes for minority populations.
“The rules are changing all the time. Communication is not clear. Study the sections.” [are] “The pause is being made. It just brings a lack of stability and an environment of uncertainty,” said Samira Asghari, a tenure-track assistant professor at the Institute for Genomic Health at the Oakland School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
While many minority health research projects have had their grants exhausted, others have managed to operate while retaining funding. But to sustain their research financially, scientists have sought alternative funding sources or changed their grant application strategies altogether.
“It’s fundamentally going to hurt science, because it becomes much more competitive to get grants,” Asghari said. “It’s already a numbers game, and even the best proposals may not be funded for all kinds of reasons.”
Trump’s dismissal targets minority health research
trump administration directed agencies Ending DEI programs and grants at the beginning of the year, resulting in the cancellation of several hundred NIH grants.
“There was no specific type of institution that was spared,” said Michael Liu, a resident physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. “We have seen public and private institutions across the United States impacted.”
However, Liu and other researchers found Some NIH Institutes More funding than others was eliminated. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities endured the largest cuts during the initial phase of the expiration – more than $505 million and $223 million, respectively.
supreme court Green signal to Trump administration NIH funding continued to expire in August, although separate legal challenges managed to unequivocally preserve some grants.
Although the Senate Administration’s proposed cuts rejected The White House implemented a forward funding policy for NIH and at NIH’s 28 institutes, preserving the agency’s $48 billion budget.
Under the new policy, institutions now offer multi-year funding for a project in advance. According to the researchers, this means the agency does not have to build year-round infrastructure for many grants, resulting in less funding being awarded.
Timmy Adediran, a research postdoctoral fellow in the University of Michigan’s department of microbiology and immunology, said the forward funding will make the grants more competitive. He said this could make planning projects more difficult.
“It can be hard to understand what your budget will be, and it can be hard to figure out how to employ the people needed,” he said.
Changes in the peer review process have left researchers nervous about political appointees deciding who to award grants to, rather than long-standing panels of scientists.
Nathaniel Tran, assistant professor of health policy at the University of Illinois-Chicago School of Public Health, is a researcher on a federally funded project researching health among older LGBTQ+ adults. He said the project had passed the previous peer review project in President Trump’s first term.
“It was scored and rewarded, and at the time, pure scientists said it was good science. It was high-quality science that was asking important questions, and it included LGBT people, or used a sample of LGBTQ people to ask scientific questions,” Tran said.
Although Tran’s group’s application to renew the project again scored well, funding for the original project was terminated earlier this year. After a lawsuit, the project’s funding was resumed, and its renovation funding was eventually awarded.
The White House has taken steps to reduce the power of NIH peer-review boards – which typically consist of certified scientists – and allow political appointees. make more impact On which the grant is funded.
Eli Mahoney, senior vice president for policy and advocacy, said, “How exactly this is going to play out is unclear, but it would certainly make a difference to have more of a political layer on each grant to make sure these grants comply with the administration’s priorities.” research!americaA medical and health research advocacy coalition.
“The Trump administration is committed to federal funding of cutting-edge biomedical research that can save lives and improve our quality of life – not just ideological pet projects,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai told The Hill in a statement.
Changes in research priorities
Although the Trump administration has explicitly announced that it will root out DEI from the government, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya has taken a more measured approach in laying out which projects NIH will and will not fund.
“NIH has invested significantly in health disparities research, focusing primarily on identifying and documenting poor health outcomes for minority populations,” Bhattacharya said. Wrote in August NIH directive,
Although he acknowledged the importance of the research, he also wrote that it had not translated into “measurable improved health” for minority communities. Going forward, they wrote, NIH will instead prioritize research that focuses on “solution-oriented approaches” to addressing poor health outcomes in minority communities.
“I think anyone who works in health equity … would agree that no one enjoys being a professional critic,” said Kushal Kadakia, a resident physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, who researched the grant termination with Liu. “Everyone hopes to one day move from diagnosis to treatment, which is similar to what we do in the hospital as doctors. There’s not much joy in just telling someone what’s wrong without telling them the solution, because that’s always the next question.”
But he said “clinical equity research” — research that identifies disparities in health care or health outcomes — is still important.
“It’s very difficult to formulate solutions or design them if you don’t know where the problem is,” Kadakia said. “So I think the research agenda needs to prioritize both, which I think was true before 2025 and is also true in 2025.”
In a statement to The Hill, an NIH spokesperson said that Bhattacharya and Trump were “fully united in advancing truth-based science that serves all Americans regardless of background or status.”
“At NIH, producing evidence-driven, gold-standard research free from ideological influence is our highest priority,” the spokesperson said. “We’re bringing the focus back to real science.” The spokesperson said the agency will “leave no stone unturned in identifying the root causes” of America’s “chronic disease epidemic.”
The administration continued to target DEI programs throughout the summer. In August, NIH’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, in compliance with Trump’s executive orders targeting DEI, ended an NIH program that sought to diversify the biomedical workforce.
“HHS is committed to ensuring equal treatment under the law in its grant programs,” the notice said. reads the announcement of the program’s end,
According to Prakash Nagarkatti, director of the NIH Center of Dietary Supplements and Inflammation at the University of South Carolina, the program’s demise comes after NIH ended a grant program earlier this year that had allowed research teams to hire researchers from minority backgrounds. Nagarakatti said that if he did not have his own financial resources he would have had to lay off people from his team.
Namrata Kandula and Alka Kanaya are both principal investigators Mediators of atherosclerosis in South Asians living in the US. (Masala) The study states that their project is entirely federally funded.
Through nearly $19 million in grants from NIH over the past decade, the project has made discoveries that have changed national screening guidelines for heart disease and diabetes in South Asian and other Asian American groups.
Kanaya said there is a lot to be lost if their study – which fits under diagnostic equity research – does not continue. “We’ve kind of described the problem, but now it’s time to really have a deeper understanding of what’s actually creating the risk? And then, what can we do about it?”
Asghari, an assistant professor at Mount Sinai, said NIH contacted him about changing the language of his grant. Through funding from two NIH institutes, he and his team have conducted research on the spread of infectious diseases among minority communities.
“We changed the language to remove some of the language about diversity, health disparities, equity,” Asghari said. “It wasn’t funny at all, because these words were basically at the core of the project.”
“When we study minority populations, it doesn’t mean that what we find doesn’t apply to other population groups,” Asghari said. “Some of our discoveries are fundamental genetic discoveries that can be identified through the study of genetic variants that are present only in one population and not in another.”
Changing funding strategies
Anticipating difficult upcoming grant cycles, researchers have begun strategizing to secure funding moving forward.
The researchers and Asgari of the spice study hope to continue inquiring for federal funding – but will apply for more grants to increase their chances of securing funding.
Asghari said it would take a lot of time, but felt it was necessary. Still, he believes this process may discourage others from research if they do not have the time or energy to aggressively pursue these grants.
“Masala is now also seeking donations from private donors, as it may appear that federal funding may not be forthcoming,” Kandula said.
Meanwhile, Adediran — who considers herself an early career researcher — said that moving forward, she will focus on clearly communicating aspects of her work and how her findings can be generalized.
“I think the term ‘inequality’ is often used as an umbrella term, but I think it might be possible to be more specific on what you mean by ‘doing inequality work.’ [helpful]Adediran said. “I’m trying to be very clear about what I’m seeing and how I think it might help us better understand how infectious disease is acquired and transmitted.”
Other researchers’ concerns focus on how to keep the money already awarded, which is in danger of being taken away.
“For a large research project focusing on LGBTQ health and social networks and policy impacts, particularly anti-LGBT policy, funding it as a multiyear award right now, it’s a double-edged sword,” Tran said.
Tran also said that no single organization can replace NIH – meaning that scientists must be able to rely on it for research or continue trying to get funding from it.
“There’s no one, their philanthropy can fill that gap. There’s no foundation that has enough money for $45 billion worth of science,” Tran said. “That’s the unfortunate, really uncomfortable truth.”
