Connect with us

Science

Trump Administration Slashes Research Into L.G.B.T.Q. Health

Published

on

Trump Administration Slashes Research Into L.G.B.T.Q. Health

The Trump administration has scrapped more than $800 million worth of research into the health of L.G.B.T.Q. people, abandoning studies of cancers and viruses that tend to affect members of sexual minority groups and setting back efforts to defeat a resurgence of sexually transmitted infections, according to an analysis of federal data by The New York Times.

In keeping with its deep opposition to both diversity programs and gender-affirming care for adolescents, the administration has worked aggressively to root out research touching on equity measures and transgender health.

But its crackdown has reverberated far beyond those issues, eliminating swaths of medical research on diseases that disproportionately afflict L.G.B.T.Q. people, a group that comprises nearly 10 percent of American adults.

Of the 669 grants that the National Institutes of Health had canceled in whole or in part as of early May, at least 323 — nearly half of them — related to L.G.B.T.Q. health, according to a review by The Times of every terminated grant.

Federal officials had earmarked $806 million for the canceled projects, many of which had been expected to draw more funding in the years to come.

Advertisement

Scores of research institutions lost funding, a list that includes not only White House targets like Johns Hopkins and Columbia, but also public universities in the South and the Midwest, like Ohio State University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham.

At Florida State University, $41 million worth of research was canceled, including a major effort to prevent H.I.V. in adolescents and young adults, who experience a fifth of new infections in the United States each year.

In termination letters over the last two months, the N.I.H. justified the cuts by telling scientists that their L.G.B.T.Q. work “no longer effectuates agency priorities.” In some cases, the agency said canceled research had been “based on gender identity,” which gave rise to “unscientific” results that ignored “biological realities.”

Other termination letters told scientists their studies erred by being “based primarily on artificial and nonscientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives.”

The cuts follow a surge in federal funding for L.G.B.T.Q. research over the past decade, and active encouragement from the N.I.H. for grant proposals focused on sexual and gender minority groups that began during the Obama administration.

Advertisement

President Trump’s allies have argued that the research is shot through with ideological bias.

“There’s been a train of abuses of the science to fit a preconceived conclusion,” said Roger Severino of the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that helped formulate some Trump administration policies.

“And that was based on an unscientific premise that biology is effectively irrelevant, and a political project of trying to mainstream the notion that people could change their sex.”

Scientists said canceling research on such a broad range of illnesses related to sexual and gender minority groups effectively created a hierarchy of patients, some more worthy than others.

“Certain people in the United States shouldn’t be getting treated as second-class research subjects,” said Simon Rosser, a professor at the University of Minnesota whose lab was studying cancer in L.G.B.T.Q. people before significant funding was pulled.

Advertisement

“That, I think, is anyone’s definition of bigotry,” he added. “Bigotry in science.”

The canceled projects are among the most vivid manifestations of a broad dismantling of the infrastructure that has for 80 years supported medical research across the United States.

Beyond terminating studies, federal officials have gummed up the grant-making process by slow-walking payments, delaying grant review meetings and scaling back new grant awards.

Bigger changes may be in store: Mr. Trump on Friday proposed reducing the N.I.H. budget from roughly $48 billion to $27 billion, citing in part what he described as the agency’s efforts to promote “radical gender ideology.”

The legality of the mass terminations is unclear. Two separate lawsuits challenging the revocation of a wide range of grants — one filed by a group of researchers, and the other by 16 states — argued that the Trump administration had failed to offer a legal rationale for the cuts.

Advertisement

The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the health department, told The Daily Signal, a conservative publication, last month that the move “away from politicized D.E.I. and gender ideology studies” was in “accordance with the president’s executive orders.”

The N.I.H. said in a statement: “N.I.H. is taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with N.I.H. and H.H.S. priorities. We remain dedicated to restoring our agency to its tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science.”

The L.G.B.T.Q. cuts ended studies on antibiotic resistance, undiagnosed autism in sexual minority groups, and certain throat and other cancers that disproportionately affect those groups. Funding losses have led to firings at some L.G.B.T.Q.-focused labs that had only recently been preparing to expand.

The N.I.H. used to reserve grant cancellations for rare cases of research misconduct or possible harm to participants. The latest cuts, far from protecting research participants, are instead putting them in harm’s way, scientists said.

Advertisement

They cited the jettisoning of clinical trials, which have now been left without federal funding to care for volunteer participants.

“We’re stopping things that are preventing suicide and preventing sexual violence,” said Katie Edwards, a professor at the University of Michigan, whose funding for several clinical trials involving L.G.B.T.Q. people was canceled.

H.I.V. research has been hit particularly hard.

The N.I.H. ended several major grants to the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for H.I.V./AIDS Intervention, a program that had helped lay the groundwork for the use in adolescents of a medication regimen that can prevent infections.

That regimen, known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, is credited with helping beat back the disease in young people.

Advertisement

Cuts to the program have endangered an ongoing trial of a product that would prevent both H.I.V. and pregnancy and a second trial looking at combining sexual health counseling with behavioral therapy to reduce the spread of H.I.V. in young sexual minority men who use stimulants.

Together with the termination of dozens of other H.I.V. studies, the cuts have undermined Mr. Trump’s stated goal from his first term to end the country’s H.I.V. epidemic within a decade, scientists said.

The N.I.H. terminated work on other sexually transmitted illnesses, as well.

Dr. Matthew Spinelli, an infectious disease researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, was in the middle of a clinical trial of doxycycline, a common antibiotic that, taken after sex, can prevent some infections with syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia.

The trial was, he said, “as nerdy as it gets”: a randomized study in which participants were given different regimens of the antibiotic to see how it is metabolized.

Advertisement

He hoped the findings would help scientists understand the drug’s effectiveness in women, and also its potential to cause drug resistance, a concern that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had voiced in the past.

But health officials, citing their opposition to research regarding “gender identity,” halted funding for the experiment in March. That left Dr. Spinelli without any federal funding to monitor the half-dozen people who had already been taking the antibiotic.

It also put the thousands of doses that Dr. Spinelli had bought with taxpayer money at risk of going to waste. He said stopping work on diseases like syphilis and H.I.V. would allow new outbreaks to spread.

“The H.I.V. epidemic is going to explode again as a result of these actions,” said Dr. Spinelli, who added that he was speaking only for himself, not his university. “It’s devastating for the communities affected.”

Despite a recent emphasis on the downsides of transitioning, federal officials canceled several grants examining the potential risks of gender-affirming hormone therapy. The projects looked at whether hormone therapy could, for example, increase the risk of breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, altered brain development or H.I.V.

Advertisement

Other terminated grants examined ways of addressing mental illness in transgender people, who now make up about 3 percent of high school students and report sharply higher rates of persistent sadness and suicide attempts.

For Dr. Edwards, of the University of Michigan, funding was halted for a clinical trial looking at how online mentoring might reduce depression and self-harm among transgender teens, one of six studies of hers that were canceled.

Another examined interventions for the families of L.G.B.T.Q. young people to promote more supportive caregiving and, in turn, reduce dating violence and alcohol use among the young people.

The N.I.H. categorizes research only by certain diseases, making it difficult to know how much money the agency devotes to L.G.B.T.Q. health. But a report in March estimated that such research made up less than 1 percent of the N.I.H. portfolio over a decade.

The Times sought to understand the scale of terminated funding for L.G.B.T.Q. medical research by reviewing the titles and, in many cases, research summaries for each of the 669 grants that the Trump administration said it had canceled in whole or in part as of early May.

Advertisement

Beyond grants related to L.G.B.T.Q. people and the diseases and treatments that take a disproportionate toll on them, The Times included in its count studies that were designed to recruit participants from sexual and gender minority groups.

It excluded grants related to illnesses like H.I.V. that were focused on non-L.G.B.T.Q. patients.

While The Times examined only N.I.H. research grants, the Trump administration is also ending or considering ending L.G.B.T.Q. programs elsewhere in the federal health system. It has proposed, for example, scrapping a specialized suicide hotline for L.G.B.T.Q. young people.

The research cuts stand to hollow out a field that in the last decade had not only grown larger, but also come to encompass a wider range of disease threats beyond H.I.V.

Already, scientists said, younger researchers are losing jobs in sexual and gender minority research and scrubbing their online biographies of evidence that they ever worked in the field.

Advertisement

Five grants obtained by Brittany Charlton, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, have been canceled, including one looking at sharply elevated rates of stillbirths among L.G.B.T.Q. women.

Ending research on disease threats to gender and sexual minority groups, she said, would inevitably rebound on the entire population. “When other people are sick around you, it does impact you, even if you may think it doesn’t,” she said.

Irena Hwang contributed reporting.

Science

AI windfall helps California narrow projected $3-billion budget deficit

Published

on

AI windfall helps California narrow projected -billion budget deficit
p]:text-cms-story-body-color-text clearfix”>

California and its state-funded programs are heading into a period of volatile fiscal uncertainty, driven largely by events in Washington and on Wall Street.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget chief warned Friday that surging revenues tied to the artificial intelligence boom are being offset by rising costs and federal funding cuts. The result: a projected $3-billion state deficit for the next fiscal year despite no major new spending initiatives.

The Newsom administration on Friday released its proposed $348.9-billion budget for the fiscal year that begins July 1, formally launching negotiations with the Legislature over spending priorities and policy goals.

“This budget reflects both confidence and caution,” Newsom said in a statement. “California’s economy is strong, revenues are outperforming expectations, and our fiscal position is stable because of years of prudent fiscal management — but we remain disciplined and focused on sustaining progress, not overextending it.”

Advertisement

Newsom’s proposed budget did not include funding to backfill the massive cuts to Medicaid and other public assistance programs by President Trump and the Republican-led Congress, changes expected to lead to millions of low-income Californians losing healthcare coverage and other benefits.

“If the state doesn’t step up, communities across California will crumble,” California State Assn. of Counties Chief Executive Graham Knaus said in a statement.

The governor is expected to revise the plan in May using updated revenue projections after the income tax filing deadline, with lawmakers required to approve a final budget by June 15.

Newsom did not attend the budget presentation Friday, which was out of the ordinary, instead opting to have California Director of Finance Joe Stephenshaw field questions about the governor’s spending plan.

“Without having significant increases of spending, there also are no significant reductions or cuts to programs in the budget,” Stephenshaw said, noting that the proposal is a work in progress.

Advertisement

California has an unusually volatile revenue system — one that relies heavily on personal income taxes from high-earning residents whose capital gains rise and fall sharply with the stock market.

Entering state budget negotiations, many expected to see significant belt tightening after the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office warned in November that California faces a nearly $18-billion budget shortfall. The governor’s office and Department of Finance do not always agree, or use the LAO’s estimates.

On Friday, the Newsom administration said it is projecting a much smaller deficit — about $3 billion — after assuming higher revenues over the next three fiscal years than were forecast last year. The gap between the governor’s estimate and the LAO’s projection largely reflects differing assumptions about risk: The LAO factored in the possibility of a major stock market downturn.

“We do not do that,” Stephenshaw said.

Among the key areas in the budget:

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Science

California confirms first measles case for 2026 in San Mateo County as vaccination debates continue

Published

on

California confirms first measles case for 2026 in San Mateo County as vaccination debates continue

Barely more than a week into the new year, the California Department of Public Health confirmed its first measles case of 2026.

The diagnosis came from San Mateo County, where an unvaccinated adult likely contracted the virus from recent international travel, according to Preston Merchant, a San Mateo County Health spokesperson.

Measles is one of the most infectious viruses in the world, and can remain in the air for two hours after an infected person leaves, according to the CDPH. Although the U.S. announced it had eliminated measles in 2000, meaning there had been no reported infections of the disease in 12 months, measles have since returned.

Last year, the U.S. reported about 2,000 cases, the highest reported count since 1992, according to CDC data.

“Right now, our best strategy to avoid spread is contact tracing, so reaching out to everybody that came in contact with this person,” Merchant said. “So far, they have no reported symptoms. We’re assuming that this is the first [California] measles case of the year.”

Advertisement

San Mateo County also reported an unvaccinated child’s death from influenza this week.

Across the country, measles outbreaks are spreading. Today, the South Carolina State Department of Public Health confirmed the state’s outbreak had reached 310 cases. The number has been steadily rising since an initial infection in July spread across the state and is now reported to be connected with infections in North Carolina and Washington.

Similarly to San Mateo’s case, the first reported infection in South Carolina came from an unvaccinated person who was exposed to measles while traveling internationally.

At the border of Utah and Arizona, a separate measles outbreak has reached 390 cases, stemming from schools and pediatric centers, according to the Utah Department of Health and Human Services.

Canada, another long-standing “measles-free” nation, lost ground in its battle with measles in November. The Public Health Agency of Canada announced that the nation is battling a “large, multi-jurisdictional” measles outbreak that began in October 2024.

Advertisement

If American measles cases follow last year’s pattern, the United States is facing losing its measles elimination status next.

For a country to lose measles-free status, reported outbreaks must be of the same locally spread strain, as was the case in Canada. As many cases in the United States were initially connected to international travel, the U.S. has been able to hold on to the status. However, as outbreaks with American-origin cases continue, this pattern could lead the Pan American Health Organization to change the country’s status.

In the first year of the Trump administration, officials led by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have promoted lowering vaccine mandates and reducing funding for health research.

In December, Trump’s presidential memorandum led to this week’s reduced recommended childhood vaccines; in June, Kennedy fired an entire CDC vaccine advisory committee, replacing members with multiple vaccine skeptics.

Experts are concerned that recent debates over vaccine mandates in the White House will shake the public’s confidence in the effectiveness of vaccines.

Advertisement

“Viruses and bacteria that were under control are being set free on our most vulnerable,” Dr. James Alwine, a virologist and member of the nonprofit advocacy group Defend Public Health, said to The Times.

According to the CDPH, the measles vaccine provides 97% protection against measles in two doses.

Common symptoms of measles include cough, runny nose, pink eye and rash. The virus is spread through breathing, coughing or talking, according to the CDPH.

Measles often leads to hospitalization and, for some, can be fatal.

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Science

Trump administration declares ‘war on sugar’ in overhaul of food guidelines

Published

on

Trump administration declares ‘war on sugar’ in overhaul of food guidelines

The Trump administration announced a major overhaul of American nutrition guidelines Wednesday, replacing the old, carbohydrate-heavy food pyramid with one that prioritizes protein, healthy fats and whole grains.

“Our government declares war on added sugar,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a White House press conference announcing the changes. “We are ending the war on saturated fats.”

“If a foreign adversary sought to destroy the health of our children, to cripple our economy, to weaken our national security, there would be no better strategy than to addict us to ultra-processed foods,” Kennedy said.

Improving U.S. eating habits and the availability of nutritious foods is an issue with broad bipartisan support, and has been a long-standing goal of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement.

During the press conference, he acknowledged both the American Medical Association and the American Assn. of Pediatrics for partnering on the new guidelines — two organizations that earlier this week condemned the administration’s decision to slash the number of diseases that U.S. children are vaccinated against.

Advertisement

“The American Medical Association applauds the administration’s new Dietary Guidelines for spotlighting the highly processed foods, sugar-sweetened beverages, and excess sodium that fuel heart disease, diabetes, obesity, and other chronic illnesses,” AMA president Bobby Mukkamala said in a statement.

Continue Reading

Trending