Report: Health Research, Especially for Gay Men, Gutted in Wave of Grant Cancellations

Researchers investigating issues pertaining to LGBTQ+ health – particularly with respect to gay men – are seeing their grants disappear as the government continues to gut science and academia.

NBC News reported that "academics who focus on improving the health of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer Americans have been subjected to waves of grant cancellations from the National Institutes of Health."

Close to 300 grants "have been eliminated," the news outlet said, with "at least $125 million" in funds no longer accessible to health researchers – "though the true sum is likely much greater," the report added.

The cancellations are part of a larger ongoing pattern, NBC News explained, reporting on notifications of cancellations that "allude to executive orders issued by President Donald Trump, including one that effectively bars recognition of transgender identities and another forbidding diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, initiatives.

"Other LGBTQ-focused grants have been swept up in the Trump administration's broadsides against Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania," the report added. "Academics fear more cancellations as the administration targets Harvard University."

The rollbacks affect "[h]undreds of researchers... [who] have watched as the system that supports their life's work – to address the myriad health disparities faced by sexual and gender minorities – has been upended," NBC News went on to note.

The cuts can feel punitive, as researchers "suddenly face potential unemployment and a job market rendered bleak by the Trump administration's efforts to downsize funding for academic research."

The most recent barrage hit the CDC this week, with cuts on April 1 decimating "programs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that surveil the HIV epidemic among gay men in particular, according to a CDC official who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals," NBC News relayed.

Among the casualties was "a lab that conducts specialized testing of and assessment for drug resistance among bacterial sexually transmitted infections, including syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia, which are especially prevalent in gay men," the story added.

The damage is wiping out decades of public health progress. The director of the Institute for Sexual and Gender Minority Health and Wellbeing at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, Brian Mustanski, told NBC News that the gutting of grants to researchers at the institute "has been a devastating experience," with half of his team of 120 researchers impacted by the cuts.

The current administration's starvation of pubic health resources "includes research into reducing rates of HIV and other STIs," NBC News noted. "Such studies have also been canceled if they include trans people as an additional risk group," with transgender Americans a focus of Donald Trump's attacks even while he and Vice President J.D. Vance were on the campaign trail last fall.

The rhetoric from the government has claimed that transgender people are somehow associated with "radical gender ideology," and a statement from the recently installed director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, followed that outline, declaring that the NIH is "committed to supporting research aimed at improving the health and well-being of every American" while moving "away from politicized DEI and gender ideology studies..."

Trump stunned the science and health field earlier this month by inveighing against what he claimed were "transgender mice" being created by scientists with taxpayer money.

In actuality, science uses transgenic mice (as well as other transgenic laboratory animals), their DNA modified to incorporate genetic sequences from other organisms. And while "The National Institutes of Health allocated funding to study biological sex differences in the brain – research that helps us understand mental health conditions, neurological disorders, and yes, gender identity," the Wisconsin Examiner explained, "only $1.4 million [out of $8 million] went specifically toward transgender research."

"The rest? It was spent on studies of Alzheimer's, PTSD, and depression – research that could save lives."

NBC News relayed a further statement from Bhattacharya, who claimed that the NIH "would be committed to research that improves the health of all Americans, 'regardless of their sexual identity,' though it notably did not mention gender identity."

That statement also claimed "that the agency would shift its priorities toward 'research aimed at preventing, treating, and curing chronic conditions like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and many others that cause so much suffering and deaths among all Americans, LGBTQ individuals included,'" NBC News detailed – though "The statement made no specific mention of HIV, a chronic health condition that disproportionately affects gay men and trans women."

"Also not mentioned was that at least 16 of the LGBTQ-focused grants that were terminated concerned cancer, diabetes or heart disease," the report observed.

Even where research is specifically geared toward sexuality and gender, there's value to science, and to public health, in such research. NBC News noted that "30 editors of leading journals that focus on sex and gender research published an editorial last month in The Journal of Sex Research on this work's importance."

"Research into sexuality and gender is vital for identifying social, cultural, and medical needs of populations, and addressing inequalities across populations," the report quoted from the editorial. "Any limiting of research and forcing specific research agendas is an infringement on academic freedom and integrity."

That infringement translates to scientists being silenced.

"Most of my colleagues are afraid to speak out, or they're being muzzled by their institutions," Harvard Medical School's Julia Marcus, "an infectious disease epidemiologist," told NBC News.

"This is what authoritarianism looks like," Marcus, "who lost all her NIH grant funding for a trio of HIV and STI prevention studies," added. "Fear keeps people silent," said Marcus.

Mustanski pointed out that the vague claims of rooting out so-called "DEI" – which in actuality stands for "diversity, equity, and inclusion," and which, prior to the acronym being politicized, was applied to efforts to level professional playing fields so that qualified candidates from marginalized groups would not be automatically passed over – are "a big problem for scientists, because science is all about precision."

Aside from political rationales, the nature of infectious diseases and other public health concerns means that pathogens and other health risks cannot simply be boxed in and contained by edicts or rhetoric. Without sustained efforts to understand and combat health risks, rates of infectious diseases will inevitably climb and poorer health outcomes are more likely.

A grant to Mustanski's institute that the NIH had previously cancelled funded a "long-running study of the drivers of HIV acquisition, substance use and other negative health outcomes in young gay men," NBC News detailed.

Fenway Health's Dr. Kenneth Mayer acknowledged that without government funding, efforts into queer health research and disease prevention among the LGTBQ+ population "could collapse."

America has been down this road before, with a disinterested government allowing the AIDS crisis to balloon into a major epidemic in the 1980s. It's an epoch the director of the Duke Global Health Institute, Dr. Chris Beyrer, recalls all too well.

"When I started my career in HIV research, there were really no dedicated funds," he told NBC News.

"Recently, he added, he's been haunted by that period in his career, four decades ago, when he cared for babies dying of AIDS," the outlet added. "This was a time when gay men perished of the disease by the tens of thousands while then-President Ronald Reagan remained largely, and notoriously, impassive."

The eventual outcomes for LGBTQ+ people's health could be catastrophic – and that would almost certainly spill over into negative health outcomes for straight and cisgender people, as well. Even some of those who, like the president, wish to see "DEI" scrubbed from government grants have taken note that the administration's approach has gone too far in reach, coupled with insufficient precision in how the rollbacks are implemented.

"Leor Sapir, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has advocated for NIH reforms that align with Trump's orders on DEI and trans issues," NBC News reported. "However, he criticized the administration for its overly broad 'search-term-based cancellation' of NIH grants."

Sapir called the grant cancellations "quintessential bull in a china shop – Trumpesque," and added: "A much more fine-tuned approach needs to happen."