Research

When I was helping to pass the non-discrimination bill one thing we heard over and over... show us the data! We couldn't even tell them the number of trans people in Connecticut, let alone the effects of discrimination. But in the late 2010s that changed, the feds were giving grants to study us! But now...

The Very Idea of LGBTQ Health Is Under Attack

The Trump administration has canceled millions of dollars in grants to study disparities affecting the well-being of the community. Valuable research has been lost. 

Bloomberg

By Lisa Jarvis

April 10, 2025

Amid the turmoil at the country’s federal agencies, a disturbing pattern has emerged: research addressing differences in the health and well-being of LGBTQ Americans is being acutely targeted.

The Trump administration’s aim appears twofold: to deny the existence of disparities affecting nearly one in 10 Americans and to ensure there’s no paper trail proving the harm caused by policies that target the community.

According to a Bloomberg Opinion analysis, more than half of the 550 grants terminated over the last six weeks by the National Institutes of Health — collectively estimated to be worth billions of dollars — addressed LGBTQ health somehow. (Columbia University’s grants were excluded from our tally because they all were canceled or frozen amid Trump’s claims of antisemitism at the school.)

Scientists typically were told their work “no longer effectuates agency priorities.” The form letter many of them received called their work — all of which had undergone months of rigorous evaluation to obtain federal funding — “non-scientific.” Some researchers were told their studies “ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities.” At the same time, other letters claimed the projects “do nothing to expand our knowledge of living systems, provide low returns on investment, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness.”

Hey, when you are a racist, a homophobe, and a misogynist, the last thing that you want to do is study the effects of discrimination!

Many of the canceled grants focused on establishing evidence-backed approaches to supporting LGBTQ kids and their families. Teens who identify as a sexual minority are more than twice as likely to report poor mental health and three times as likely to have considered suicide than their heterosexual peers, a reality that researchers have been working hard to understand and change.

When you have a pogrom against LGBTQ+ people the last thing you want is to give them ammunition to prove discrimination.

Science reported that,

The Trump order, which ends “radical and wasteful government DEI,” is “hard to read,” says Ashley Juavinett, a neuroscientist at University of California San Diego, who runs a U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded program to increase diversity among neuroscientists, a historically affluent and white group. “The language is so severe and contradictory to all the things we’re trying to do,” she says. A White House memo released yesterday adds to concerns by halting all federal grants so agency officials can review them for DEI and other topics targeted by the executive orders.

By the end of last week, some agencies with funding opportunities that promote diversity abruptly ended consideration of future awards. One program—the NIH Research Supplements to Promote Diversity in Health-Related Research—was labeled as expired, 15 months earlier than the original date of 8 May 2026, according to an NIH web page updated on 24 January. The page is now defunct. Requests for these diversity supplements, which allow researchers to request additional funding to hire trainees from underrepresented backgrounds, can no longer be reviewed because the program “no longer exists,” says Carole LaBonne, a molecular biologist at Northwestern University who noticed the change as she was monitoring changes to diversity grant funding.

At one time research was only done on White males! If you were a Black woman there was zero medical research on you. Trump & Company yanked the grants from Harvard in retaliation for them snubbing "The Donald" and People magazine wrote...

“No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” Harvard president Alan Garber wrote in an open letter Monday afternoon.

Trump’s antisemitism task force fired back, saying, “Harvard’s statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation’s most prestigious universities and colleges — that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws.” 

The freeze in funding doesn’t just affect the researchers or those whose projects might help in the future. For Sarah Fortune, lead scientist on a promising tuberculosis study, even more lives are at stake.

Her $60 million contract with the NIH included studying the effects of the vaccines for the deadly disease on macaques, a type of primate. Fortune told the Boston Globe the macaques may have to be euthanized if they cannot spend federal funds to feed and care for them.

"The Donald" doesn't give a damn about anything except power and money! He only cares how he can manipulate for his enrichment. 

Hers is not an isolated situation. In addition to possibly laying off scientists if the funding freeze continues for too long, Fortune noted, “Anybody who has animal studies ongoing... is looking at killing the animals.”

Or anything in his way!

Beyond Ivy League, RFK Jr.’s NIH Slashed Science Funding Across States That Backed Trump

KFF Health News

By Rae Ellen Bichell and Rachana Pradhan

April 17, 2025

The National Institutes of Health’s sweeping cuts of grants that fund scientific research are inflicting pain almost universally across the U.S., including in most states that backed President Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

[...]

The Trump administration has singled out Ivy League universities including Columbia and Harvard for broad federal funding cuts. But the spending reductions at the NIH, the nation’s foremost source of funding for biomedical research, go much further: Of about 220 organizations that had grants terminated, at least 94 were public universities, including flagship state schools in places such as Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Nebraska, and Texas.

But it is not so much where the cuts were but rather what research on what diseases, that is the important factor.

Sybil Hosek, a research professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, helps run a network that focuses on improving care for people 13 to 24 years old who are living with or at risk for HIV. The NIH awarded Florida State University $73 million to lead the HIV project.

“We never thought they would destroy an entire network dedicated to young Americans,” said Hosek, one of the principal investigators of the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV/AIDS Interventions. The termination “doesn’t make sense to us.”

[...]

Kennedy has said the NIH should take a years-long pause from funding infectious disease research. In November 2023, he told an anti-vaccine group, “I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, ‘God bless you all. Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years,’” according to NBC News.

For years, Kennedy has peddled falsehoods about vaccines — including that “no vaccine” is “safe and effective,” and that “there are other studies out there” showing a connection between vaccines and autism, a link that has repeatedly been debunked — and claimed falsely that HIV is not the only cause of AIDS.

Diseases never take time off! The Bird Flu has spread to mammals! Some of the research areas being cut...

• Antibiotic Resistance
• Climate-Driven Vector-Borne Diseases
• Zoonotic Spillovers
• Bioterrorism and Lab Leaks
• Global Health Policy and Preparedness

Diseases don't care about politics!

For Trump is there isn't something in it for him, he cuts it!