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In an unprecedented move, the National Institutes of Health is abruptly terminating millions of dollars in research awards to scientists in Massachusetts and around the country, citing the Trump administration’s new restrictions on funding anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, transgender issues, or research that could potentially benefit universities in China.
The sweeping actions would appear to violate court rulings from federal judges in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C., that block the Trump administration from freezing or ending billions of dollars in government spending, said David Super, a constitutional law expert at Georgetown Law, who reviewed some of the termination letters at the Globe’s request.
In a related case brought by an association of higher education officials that specifically challenged Trump’s various DEI executive orders, a federal judge in Maryland twice over the past month blocked the administration from terminating funding, saying in his most recent decision the restrictions “punish, or threaten to punish, individuals and institutions based on the content of their speech, and in doing so they specifically target viewpoints the government seems to disfavor.”
Super added that the termination letters are also “unlawful” because the NIH is imposing conditions on funding that did not exist at the time the grants were awarded.
The NIH did not respond to a request for comment.
Scientists say the letters began arriving last Friday and earlier this week, notifying them their funding was being canceled because it involved subjects that are “unscientific,” do “nothing to enhance the health of many Americans,” or do “not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.”
Exactly how many NIH grants have been terminated is unclear.
With an annual budget of more than $45 billion, the NIH is the largest single public funder of biomedical research in the world, and Massachusetts is the nation’s top recipient on a per capita basis. Massachusetts researchers in the past fiscal year received more than $3.3 billion from the NIH.
Among those whose research funding was terminated is Nancy Krieger, a professor of social epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Her letter said she would not be receiving the last installment, roughly $650,000, of a five-year, $4 million award for honing time-efficient ways of asking patients about the discrimination they experience, including racism, sexism, sexual orientation, and age or weight discrimination.
“These are really important groups of people to study to understand how their life experiences are affecting their health,” Krieger said.
The letter she received said her work ran afoul of the administration’s anti-DEI rules, although Krieger said the research itself was not related to DEI.
“This is an assault not on just one little group of researchers. This is saying certain knowledge is not to be supported by the government,” Krieger said. “It’s the proverbial, ‘If there’s no data, there’s no problem.’ It means one can’t document the harms.”
The letters sent to scientists said they had 30 days to appeal to the agency for reconsideration, which Krieger said she intends to do.
Krieger’s research enrolled roughly 700 patients at three Boston community health centers including Fenway Health.
Dr. Kenneth Mayer, who heads the study arm at Fenway Health and is a professor at Harvard Medical School, said the cancellation of the grant would not immediately harm patients participating in the study. But, “it could have an impact on patient health in the future,” he said. “The whole point is to learn about biases. Some people avoid health care because they think they are going to be judged.”
He said it’s possible the four years’ worth of data already collected may be used, such as to develop training programs for doctors or educational materials for patients. “This is just such an important kind of work,” he said.
An NIH official told the Globe that administrators who oversee grants were given barely an hour’s notice of the terminations late last Friday before the notifications were sent out.
The official, who declined to be identified because they are not authorized to speak publicly, said they were aware of 24 such notices from four NIH institutes and centers, but said there are likely to be hundreds more.
This official shared a spreadsheet that showed 76 notices of funding opportunities over the past two years that the agency “unpublished,” meaning they were effectively scrubbed from public databases, potentially eliminating the funding for them.
Brittany Charlton, associate professor and founding director of the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, has not had any research funding terminated but has heard directly from several scientists who did lose their funding. She said many will appeal.
Charlton said researchers are also working to partner with civil rights organizations as they challenge the legality of these executive orders.
“This goes beyond research on LGBTQ health and includes studies seeking to understand and address health issues affecting a wide range of other vulnerable communities,” Charlton said in a statement. “Scientific inquiry is under siege and the public’s health hangs in the balance as crucial studies vanish.”
Sean Arayasirikul, a medical sociologist and an associate professor in-residence in the department of Health, Society, and Behavior at University of California Irvine, received a termination letter last Friday that stopped funding halfway through a five-year study involving roughly 900 participants.
Arayasirikul’s research studies how racism and discrimination affect people of color who are gay or transgender and need help with HIV prevention, substance use disorder, or mental health.
“That is one of the biggest priorities for HIV prevention today and not having these data and not having this knowledge hearkens back to a time when denialism around HIV was prevalent,” Arayasirikul said.
“I am starting to think now that I may lose my job and not exist in this field anymore and that’s one thing,” said Arayasirikul. “But to erase an entire generation of scholars who come from these communities, doing this work, the impact of that is immense.”