Trump’s diversity purge freezes hundreds of millions in medical research at universities across the country

By Sarah Owermohle, CNN

(CNN) — Universities across the country are scrambling to comply with President Donald Trump’s anti-diversity push in an effort to hold on to hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants that fund critical medical research in areas such as cancer and maternal health.

Last month, the Trump administration threatened to cancel medical research funds and to pull the accreditation for universities that have diversity and inclusion programs and that boycott Israeli companies.

The latest moves broaden the anti-DEI mandate that Trump signed just hours into his second term, declaring diversity, equity and inclusion efforts discriminatory.

The administration is locked in a legal battle with Harvard University that on Monday saw officials cut off future funding, escalating a total freeze on $2.2 billion in federal grants directed to Harvard. The university has sued to unlock those funds, a fight that will likely be expensive, and take months to resolve.

Most universities, particularly public and smaller institutions, lack the resources to take up the fight the way Harvard has. Dozens of schools across the country have publicly ended DEI programs and quietly taken down or rerouted websites referencing diversity and equity. Some have more openly acquiesced to the administration’s demands, banning the use of certain words and phrases such as “equality,” “gender” and “White supremacy,” and laying off dozens of university staff.

But those efforts haven’t spared them from mass funding cuts.

At Columbia University, some $250 million in health research grants remain in limbo even after the university made significant policy changes in late March to placate the administration. Leaders at Ohio State University, Vice President JD Vance’s alma mater, acted early to end DEI programs and eliminate 16 staff positions in February, citing Trump’s mandate and a state bill.

But in March, the administration still canceled 10 grants to Ohio State, clawing back $2.4 million in planned spending on HPV and Covid-19 vaccine uptake and separate studies on substance use, suicide risk and PrEP access among different LGBTQ populations.

Starting in February, the US National Institutes of Health terminated roughly 780 research grants that referenced equity, racial disparities, minority health, LGBTQ populations and Covid-19. The canceled grants spanned the country: Roughly 40% were to organizations in states Trump won in November, according to a KFF analysis.

Those have included cuts to research seemingly squarely in line with the stated goals of the Trump administration and US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., such as studies on autism diagnoses, chronic disease improvements and environmental exposures’ intersection with health.

Besides the immediate impact of frozen research and staff layoffs, scientists and public health experts worry about a chilling effect for health care studies overall. The NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, issuing roughly 60,000 grants a year to nearly 3,000 universities and hospitals. That accounts for more than 80% of the agency’s current $48 billion annual budget, although the administration aims to slash that spending by a third next year.

“People are frightened,” said Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Health Research, a nonprofit group aimed at improving health care research. “One of the things that I’ve said to people is, you know, ‘how much can you do what you’ve been doing but just call it something else?’”

That can be a tricky prospect for research on health care issues that disproportionately affect certain populations.

For instance, the US reports persistently high rates of maternal and infant deaths compared with other high-income countries. There are stark disparities within those figures: Black women are three times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than White women.

Researchers and state medical boards attribute those statistics to a range of factors including racial bias, health care access, underlying health conditions and socioeconomic status.

That makes it extraordinary difficult to strip equity, race and risks for certain populations from questions about maternal health care and other research, experts say. Whether it’s new mothers’ postpartum survival, HIV prevention in LGBTQ populations or higher risk of aggressive breast cancer in Black women, many studies necessitate a focus on the people most affected, those experts say. The NIH cut research in all those areas.

“There’s real issues here that could be better understood and responded to, and lives could be saved, but only if you study them – and only if you understand what you’re studying,” Zuckerman said.

Beyond hundreds of grants citing words such as equity, disparities, gender, minority, LGBTQ populations or race, the NIH also canceled spending on Covid-19 outreach, vaccination and messaging.

“HHS grants will only go to the most qualified applicants and will not adhere to ideological requirements or discriminatory quotas,” an HHS spokesperson said in response to questions about the canceled grants.

The mass culling of NIH grants has even stoked concern among Republican leaders who argue that the US could slide in medical innovation and world leadership with the combined funding cuts, mass layoffs and agency shakeups.

“We must not lose sight at what is truly at stake here,” Sen. Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, said during a Senate Appropriations hearing last week. “If clinical trials are halted, research is stopped and laboratories are closed, effective treatments and cures for diseases like Alzheimer’s, type 1 diabetes, childhood cancers and Duchenne muscular dystrophy will be delayed or not discovered at all.”

Maternal health and the DEI battle

In 2023, the NIH launched a $168 million initiative across 10 universities to improve maternal health care.

In March, the agency canceled funding to two of them.

Columbia University, one of the 10 maternal health centers in the mass NIH project, was one of the first schools ensnared in grant freezes and a public battle with the Trump administration.

But the broad grant cancellations also caught the Morehouse School of Medicine, part of a historically Black university in Atlanta, Georgia, a state with some of the worst maternal mortality rates in the country.

Along with Georgia’s Emory University, Morehouse stood up a program focused on improving pregnancy and postpartum care for Black women. There was $1.6 million remaining in the $2.9 million grant when the NIH cut funding. Morehouse School of Medicine President Valerie Montgomery Rice stood fast against anti-DEI efforts in February, telling local radio station WABE that “diversity, equity and inclusion, as it relates to health, is not a political term.”

The medical school is still reviewing the situation to assess how it may affect research, spokesperson Jamille Bradfield told CNN in an email. “More broadly, it is important that we all recognize the critical role medical research plays in developing potential life-saving innovation that will mitigate disease and improve the health and well-being of many people.”

Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia, a Democrat, told CNN in a statement that “This attack on Morehouse School of Medicine and maternal and postpartum health care for Black women is unacceptable and a disgrace” and saying that the administration must immediately restore funding.

The canceled Morehouse and Columbia grants were far from the only ones in the 10-institute maternal health project that cited equity, disparity, race or cultural identity. Six included related terms in the grant name; all noted disparities and disproportionate risks among Black, Hispanic or indigenous women in the abstracts, or short descriptions of their projects.

“The reason that we knew that we were having disparities in our maternal outcomes is because we started disaggregating the data. We started looking at the outcomes for Black women and White women and Hispanic women,” said one OB/GYN researcher focused on maternal mortality. “If we’re not measuring it, we won’t do anything to improve, because we won’t know. It’s almost like sticking our heads in the sand.”

The researcher asked that their name not be used because they are affiliated with one of the still-funded maternal health programs and are fearful that research could be cut next. Although many of the remaining universities in the program have publicly ended their DEI programs, none feel safe, the person said.

“I feel so helpless in this moment,” the researcher said. “There’s no logical reason for the decisions being made. And that is scary. How do you fight that? What do you do?”

Columbia OB/GYN expert Dr. Uma Reddy led the $4.6 million project to improve postpartum care by providing doulas to new mothers with mental health and cardiac complications after pregnancy – two of the top risks for maternal death in the country.

“We got input from patients, from doulas, from communities,” Reddy told CNN. “We had just launched it at the first hospital and had recruited 21 participants when we were told that we had to stop everything.”

Although the stalemate between the Trump administration and Columbia ended with university concessions in April, the maternal health grant has not been reinstated. Without NIH funding, there is little recourse, Reddy said.

“You naturally first think about industry partnership, but they’re not interested,” she said. “This is not a drug that can be marketed.”

It’s left Reddy and others in the maternal health care space confused and disheartened about the administration’s goals.

“This whole thing about making America healthy again, focusing on children – this actually does that,” Reddy said. “Because by having a healthy mother, you’re going to have healthier children, healthier families, and you actually decrease costs of federally funded health care programs.”

Americans overwhelmingly support programs to reduce maternal and infant mortality, according to a Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health poll published last month. Only solutions to chronic diseases and research into infectious diseases garnered more support in the survey of both Republicans and Democrats.

MAHA priorities amid NIH cuts

Dozens of the cancellations seemingly clash with Kennedy’s vision for a healthier America with fewer chronic illnesses, researchers said. Those include at least two research projects aimed at autism, two focused on diabetes and others on cancer research in rural and underserved areas, and disparities in long-term chronic disease outcomes. In most cases, the grants explicitly mentioned a minority population, equity or disparities in care.

Many of those researchers were years, and thousands to millions of dollars, into their projects: Some were ending soon anyway, and had just a fraction of their grants left to spend.

For instance, in March, the administration cut the remaining funding for a $12 million University of Virginia study targeted at better diagnostic tools for women and nonbinary people diagnosed with autism later in life. There was roughly $218,000 left in the grant.

The university ended its DEI programs that month with a Board of Visitors vote. “Every aspect of DEI is to be ripped out, shredded and terminated,” one of the board members told The Daily Progress.

Ohio State’s 10 canceled grants include one focused on substance use and associated chronic illnesses across sexual minorities in urban and rural areas. Of the nearly $173,000 grant, just $538.11 was left to be disbursed, according to federal data. The grant was cancelled on March 21; it was scheduled to end 10 days later.

“We are grateful for the research support we receive from our federal partners as these investments literally save lives in Ohio and our nation,” OSU spokesperson Ben Johnson said in an email. “But we are closely monitoring and managing federal notifications that have impacted a number of our faculty and laboratories.”

Johnson said that the university’s review of DEI programming is ongoing, but that certain organizations such as the Frank W. Hale, Jr. Black Cultural Center will remain open.

At the Tulane School of Medicine, the $16 million grant for the maternal health center was untouched in March funding cuts. However, the administration did axe the remaining funding, roughly $279,000, for a $4.2 million grant to study lupus progression in Black Americans. Tulane also lost funding for research on Covid-19 treatment in cancer patients.

The medical school has since quietly removed and rerouted diversity pages on its website. The psychiatry department’s page on equity, diversity and inclusion now says that the content is unavailable: “Some content is currently under review to ensure compliance with the latest federal guidelines and executive orders.”

The president of Tulane University announced in a message to students and faculty on March 13 that it would transition its DEI program into a new “Office of Academic Excellence and Opportunity” to comply with federal law. Diversity pages now reroute to that site.

“At stake here is the more than $320 million we receive annually in federal funding,” Tulane President Michael Fitts wrote in the message to students and faculty. Federal guidance and “drastic funding cuts” added fresh urgency to the change, he added.

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