Month: April 2025

CUTTING PUBLIC HEALTH RESEARCH MEANS CUTTING AMERICA DOWN

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CUTTING PUBLIC HEALTH RESEARCH MEANS CUTTING AMERICA DOWN

Dr. Common Good

I have been doing social and public health research for more than 30 years, and have never seen anything like the mindless, ill-informed, and yes, malicious cutting of grant and other public health funding that is occurring now. It is important for the public to read the language that is in these grant termination notices, and to understand the appalling and dangerous consequences of the mindset that is revealed. Here is what these letters say:

“This award no longer effectuates agency priorities. Research programs based primarily on artificial and non- scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, are antithetical to the scientific inquiry, 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. Worse, so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans. Therefore, it is the policy of NIH not to prioritize such research programs.”

Let’s just take a look at some of this language:

“Amorphous equity objectives” – At least since the 1985 report of then-Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Margaret Heckler (the seminal “Heckler Report”) documenting the extensive and significant differences in health outcomes between African-American and white Americans, trying to understand and rectify these and other disparities in health have been primary goals for HHS activities, and a central tenet of the Healthy People national planning documents that come out every decade (the most recent being Healthy People 2030). There is nothing “amorphous” about this, and no one who has the slightest shred of knowledge could possibly make such a statement. Since the Heckler Report, a large body of research has documented a broad range of health disparities. For example: In 2022 (from the Kaiser Family Foundation 2024 report), infant mortality rates for African American women (10.9/1000) and American Indian/Alaska Native women (9.1/1000) were more than twice the rates for than they were for white/non-Hispanic women (4.5/1000); maternal mortality rates are also higher for American Indian/Alaska Native and African American women than for other groups; the total diabetes percentages for Asian non-Hispanics, Hispanics, and African Americans was significantly higher than for whites (from CDC National Diabetes Report, 2024); and white rural Americans fare much worse than their urban counterparts on a number of health outcomes (Efird & Griffith, 2025). Substantial research, over many years, has also documented the preventable, unequal conditions that underlie many of these disparities, which is the basis for the concept of health inequities. These conditions include lack of access to health insurance, poverty and associated stressors, discriminatory treatment in health care, unequal exposure to environmental pollutants, poor housing conditions, and others.  

“Antithetical to scientific inquiry” – Really? What could this possibly mean? The differences in health outcomes I just referred to are exactly what scientific inquiry should focus on. To serve the American public, and to improve the lives of Americans, we should want to know why such disparities exist and do our best to correct them so that the American ideal of liberty and justice for all is fully realized. It is difficult to understand why or how anyone came up with the idea that such inquiries are antithetical to science.

“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” – This is simply nonsensical, if not madness. All research that helps understand the health and well-being of people in the United States and across the world by nature increases our understanding of living systems. Are we not “living systems”? This research has provided major, indeed historic contributions to advancing health, lengthening life and reducing illness, and most certainly provided immense returns on investment. There is not enough room in ten thousand pages like this one to document this, but a few examples should provide a clue – just think, for example, of the antiretroviral drugs that turned the tide of the once-fatal HIV/AIDS pandemic, the several COVID-19 vaccines that saved Americans and people all over the world from the ravages of that pandemic, or the mass prevention campaigns that contributed to the dramatic reduction in smoking here in the U.S., along with its associated cancers. All of these efforts were based on scientific research. What then could the author(s) of this sentence possibly have meant?

Finally, there is the wildly irrational obsession with the concocted spectre of “so-called DEI.” If the real-world data show dramatic differences between the health of one population group and others – whether those groups differ by racial categorization, ethnic background, gender, or geography (i.e., rural vs. urban) it is incumbent upon us as servants of the public good to know what is going on. There is nothing sinister involved. There is no “agenda” other than to improve the lives of all people. In fact, the opposite is true. Those who keep hammering the public with the “DEI boogeyman” are in fact using distortion and lies as an excuse to pursue an agenda of denial, to ignore the social differences that do exist and thus do nothing about them.  

These alarming and destructive funding cuts are harmful to the well-being of Americans and all peoples of the world, and they devastate the American research infrastructure that has heretofore been the envy of the world. It is light years from anything that “makes America great,” and is a fast track to making America an economic, social and intellectual backwater, and significantly weaker for it. The intentions and motivations represented in the language of these termination letters are purely ideological, and patently malicious. It is a gratuitous insult to the thousands of research professionals who have dedicated their time and their careers to making life better for others.

Shame on you, Trump administration. The American people need to know the damage you are inflicting.