“Youth Are Going to Die Because of This”: Trump Defunds Violence Prevention

Tsu-Yin Wu was shocked when the email from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) showed up in her inbox. On March 21, just 18 months into her five-year study, the NIH had unilaterally decided that Wu’s research “no longer effectuates agency priorities.” The project’s funding, like hundreds of other NIH grants across the country, was terminated immediately.

Wu, a nursing professor and director of the Center for Health Disparities Innovation and Studies at Eastern Michigan University, was developing a scientific approach to preventing firearm violence in Asian American households. “In recent years, community partners told us about an increase in Asian Americans buying guns, which could pose a potential risk for families, communities, and larger society,” Wu told me. While decades of research have shown that firearm ownership increases the risk of suicide, homicide and unintentional injury, there’s currently a lack of public health data on how the issue impacts Asian American communities specifically. Wu’s project aimed to fill in those gaps. “We want to understand the underlying risks of firearm violence,” Wu said, “because we want to find effective ways to address this safety issue though primary prevention — before it happens.”

The scientific community is reeling in the wake of the Trump administration’s attacks on federally funded research. Many academics and scientists like Wu have received notice that their work “no longer effectuates” NIH priorities or violates Trump’s ban on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs; others are waiting anxiously for the hammer to drop on their own projects. The terminations span a range of topics, from HIV research to vaccine hesitancy. More than $125 million in LGBTQ health funding has been upended.

This week I spoke with four researchers working on violence prevention and support in marginalized communities, a topic that’s been particularly hard hit by the grant terminations but has not received much media attention. They all described an atmosphere of chaos and confusion — and the fear that attacks on this line of research could lead to a more violent future.

Katie Edwards, the director of the Interpersonal Violence Research Laboratory at the University of Michigan, focuses on community-led approaches to preventing and responding to violence, particularly among LGBTQ+ youth and youth in communities of color. The lab has seen six grant cancellations thus far, with more potentially in the pipeline, forcing Edwards to consider laying off research staff.

“From a broad public health perspective, it’s really going to harm some of the most vulnerable youth in our nation by not being able to understand how to most effectively prevent violence and how to treat and support survivors of violence,” Edwards told me. “Are rapes going to go up? Are suicides going to go up? Quite frankly, I think people are going to die, and the most vulnerable youth in our nation are going to die, because of this.”

While non-scientists might hear “research” and envision work contained to a lab, many of the canceled grants are in fact clinical trials or involve field research within a community. The abrupt terminations leave in limbo not only researchers, but also the populations with which they work. Edwards said she’s been most concerned about the cancellation of a mentoring grant for LGBTQ+ youth, which aimed to prevent dating violence, substance abuse and suicide. “Just stopping in the middle of a clinical trial is extremely dangerous,” said Edwards. “The analogy to that is if you’re doing surgery on someone and you just walk out of the room and leave them on the operating table.”

Heather Littleton, a psychology professor and director of research operations of the Lyda Hill Institute for Human Resilience at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, is working with Edwards as a principal investigator on the project and echoed her concerns. “It’s going to erode trust in the research enterprise,” Littleton said. “Why would someone with a marginalized identity want to participate in a study in the future, if they know that it could be terminated at any time?”

Wu similarly stressed that the cancellation of these types of projects can undermine critical relationships between researchers and their community partners. “The community came to us; they really want to work with us; they understand this is an issue that affects them individually, their family, and their community,” she said. “It’s not only about grant money. It’s really about people’s lives and people’s trust and relationships.”

The NIH funding cuts have largely targeted projects that focus on specific marginalized populations. But all of the researchers emphasized to Truthout that the goal of this research is to level the playing field, filling in current gaps in the scientific literature, which creates better public health outcomes overall.

Jessamyn Moxie, an associate professor of epidemiology and community health at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, was six months into a project focused on training young adults on how to better support LGBTQ+ survivors of sexual violence when she received her notice of cancellation. Moxie chose to focus on peer support, because data shows that formal support systems like campus authorities and police can be harmful for sexual assault survivors with marginalized identities.

“We know that LGBTQ+ individuals experience disproportionate rates of sexual violence — two to three times what cisgender and heterosexual individuals face — and the outcomes are often worse due to the stigma,” said Moxie. “To be able to have more informal support really buttresses the gaps in the system that are currently existing … There isn’t another program that we’re aware of that does this for this population.”

Littleton also noted that the data has shown that existing violence interventions for heterosexual and cisgender teens are not efficacious for LGBTQ+ youth. “These aren’t pet projects. These aren’t special interests. These projects are designed to address a clear unmet need,” she said, adding that the field of LGBTQ+ science itself has only existed for about 25 years. “It’s an incredibly new field, and we’re just now developing folks that are doing this. And of course intimate partner violence and sexual violence research has been horrifically underfunded historically.” In other words, we can’t afford another setback.

The Trump administration has claimed that the NIH cuts are aimed at saving taxpayer dollars. But many of these projects were already months or years into the process. Now that the research is halted, the substantial time and money invested could simply go to waste. And as Edwards highlighted, in addition to the primary goal of helping kids lead happy, violence-free lives, the specific field of violence prevention actually saves taxpayer dollars in the long run.

“These public health problems in our nation, not only can we not solve them now, but they’re likely going to get worse,” Edwards said “Prevention is a lot less expensive than the aftermath of traumas.”

The process to receive NIH funding is highly competitive and includes a rigorous review by a panel of scientists over the course of many months. One researcher told Truthout that the instructions themselves were more than 100 pages long, and only about one in five proposals are granted. But researchers said that the letters that Trump’s NIH are now sending out fail to evince a basic commitment to scientific accuracy or precision. “It’s just so sad that one of the world’s leading biomedical institutes is sending out letters that are, quite frankly, things I teach in my Psych 101 classes,” said Edwards.

“Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans,” states Moxie’s NIH letter, which she shared with me. “Many such studies ignore, rather than seriously examine, biological realities.” In addition to the demonstrable falsity of these public health claims, Moxie’s research is itself not focused on gender identity; she is appealing the NIH’s decision.

But the appeal process is a “black box,” as Wu noted, with no instructions on what the NIH is looking for. And while the letters state that the decisions can be appealed, they also add that “the premise of the award is incompatible with agency priorities, and no modification of the project could align the project with agency priorities.”

Still, all of the researchers expressed a commitment to continue fighting and speaking out. Moxie said she’s been attending many conferences in the past few weeks and has seen a “flurry of activity,” as researchers come together to support one another and find innovative strategies to continue their work. While she’s encouraged to see the increased collaboration, she noted that it’s disappointing to have to expend energy on what is essentially a distraction from the urgent work of supporting marginalized populations, particularly at a moment when anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment is increasing.

Ultimately, legal action might be more successful recourse than the NIH’s internal appeal process. On April 4, attorneys general from 16 states filed a lawsuit against the NIH over the funding cuts. Edwards is a plaintiff in a class action lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against the NIH, which in a complaint accuses the agency of a “reckless and illegal purge to stamp out NIH-funded research that addresses topics and populations they disfavor.”

“The goal of public health is that every single person in this country can be healthy and thriving,” said Edwards. “They can take all my grants, they can take my staff, but I have my voice, and this isn’t justice.”