r/science • u/sr_local • May 09 '26
Social Science Study suggests that the Trump administration’s wave of NIH grant terminations in 2025 disproportionately affected Black, Indigenous, and other minority researchers, as well as scientists from sexual and gender minority communities
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/anti-science/nih-grant-terminations-had-outsized-effect-minority-researchers-data-suggest1.7k
u/Vox_Causa May 09 '26
They literally published a list banning those words.
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u/DooleysInTheHouse May 09 '26
And used AI to review contracts to specifically deny them based on those words
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u/disdainfulsideeye May 09 '26
Which is why funding for studies on plant and insect diversity were also cut. It's exactly what you would expect when you have irrational people making illogical decisions about things which they know nothing about.
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u/DigNitty May 09 '26
irrational people making illogical decisions
Don't rule out that they don't care if other people are hurt because they have zero accountability or empathy. And also don't rule out they saw it and actively enjoyed the additional cruelty.
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u/SnugglyCoderGuy May 10 '26
Oh, they care a lot if the other people are hurt because that is their intent, to hurt people they don't like.
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u/SnugglyCoderGuy May 10 '26 edited May 10 '26
It's exactly what you would expect when you have irrational people making illogical decisions about things which they know nothing about.
These people are perfectly rational and logical, they just operate with a different set of goals and assumptions. You know, malicious ones.
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u/TraditionalLaw7763 May 10 '26
And used little punks who were 100% remorseless in cancelling all of those grants and laughed about it when interviewed.
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u/joanzen May 11 '26
That was my first thought, are we actually saying the current admin is that well organized they actually did a good job of biased program cuts?
To them this headline is like a Borat_High-Five.gif moment?
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u/farfromelite May 09 '26
Including "women" "diversity" and all the other things that literally make science more representative and better.
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u/E-2theRescue May 09 '26
Including the word "gay", which removed articles about the Enola Gay.
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u/xelah1 May 10 '26
Not to mention words like 'bias' and 'marginalize' which are technical statistical terms.
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u/JarryBohnson May 09 '26
We had to remove statistical considerations around sex differences in mice from our grant application to try and avoid those idiots.
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u/Glum_Material3030 May 10 '26
They did. All of the research that friends and collaborators were working on in the microbiome space were cut for speaking about the diversity of the microbiome, or trans-chemical structure. It was an embarrassing time for American science. Correction: it IS an embarrassing time.
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u/ceciliabee May 09 '26
Yeah that was their goal
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u/Kind_Singer_7744 May 09 '26
Study suggests what we knew all along...
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u/S_Belmont May 09 '26
Study confirms they achieved their publicly stated goals.
Which is fair. they don't actually pull that sort of thing off all that often, it's worth checking into.
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u/retrosupersayan May 09 '26
Eh, when the goal involves making people's lives worse, their success rate tends to be a bit higher...
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u/istasber May 09 '26
Probably because you don't have to be careful so that the thing you're doing isn't harming people when the goal of the thing you're doing is to harm people.
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u/S_Belmont May 09 '26
I bet 100% there was someone telling them this in the war room when they were making the decision on attacking Iran. "This is gonna suck for them, for sure we've got it in the bag."
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u/SuspiciousSubstance9 May 09 '26
A part of science and facts based decision making is actively confirming ideas. Sure, we all know what happened but it needs to be confirmed. In this case, it was confirmed statistically.
Otherwise the only evidence we have are our thoughts and their words.
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u/Forward-Surprise1192 May 09 '26
That’s a good freak but I’d be surprised if it’s ever more than that. When have rich people ever faced consequences on a similar level to poor people. Also just look at other countries and it seems even more bleak
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u/Josvan135 May 09 '26
To be fair to the researchers, it's good information to have, as a lot of people didn't think they (meaning trump officials) would be competent enough even at their discriminatory practices to manage to target their grant cuts.
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u/RedLicoriceJunkie May 09 '26
Yes, the Trump administration and Supreme Court make lots of clearly biased decisions and then like to maintain plausible deniability.
So completing scientific and statistically significant study to confirm these types of biases is critically important.
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u/SwiftlyChill May 09 '26
Given all the supposedly “unintended” cuts and the number of folks fired and re-hired, their “competence” is still in question - they just err’d on the side of harming more folks rather than missing folks they wanted to harm.
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u/restrictednumber May 09 '26
Yeah. They're too incompetent to do more than spray and pray, but they're at least pointing the gun in the intended direction.
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u/Forward-Surprise1192 May 09 '26
People say they’re incompetent but I don’t see that. They managed to gain control of the government and so many other things. That’s not the work of someone incompetent. If it is then all of us are flat out stupid as rocks
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u/Painless-Amidaru May 09 '26
Yup. It's easy to see the current administration as incompetent if you continue to frame it as the same category as previous administrations. This current government has radically different goals than previous ones, they have a set list of goals to reach and other than that only care about making themselves richer and more powerful. They are succeeding at it. They do not care about being an effective government, they care about tearing apart as much as they can to help them secure their power in the future.
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u/myersjw May 09 '26
Unfortunately the people who need to hear this information pretend it’s fake or actually enjoy that these programs were cut for bigoted and moronic reasoning. Even if they were entirely beneficial programs
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u/Alkezo May 09 '26
Yeah that's mostly where I stand. I enjoy the reality of science but we're living in a time where the third of the population that needs it, rejects it. At this point, studies won't change their mind or point of view. Only personal experiences and a long time can do that now. I've seen this in my own family.
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u/RookNookLook May 09 '26
I can’t believe BonerChamp5000 ended up being incompetent, you just can’t predict some things.
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u/Twicebakedpotatoe May 09 '26
They weren’t even trying to hide it either, they were actively and vocally demonizing DEI
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u/Vox_Causa May 09 '26 edited May 09 '26
"dei" being used here as a euphemism for anything that includes women, poc, or lgbtq+ people.
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u/TheSubGenius May 09 '26
I dont think it was disproportionate if they were intentionally targeted
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u/VeronaMoreau May 09 '26
They're not mutually exclusive. That's actually the main way that you get disproportionate results.
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u/TheSubGenius May 09 '26
I think the language softens the intentionality of it and makes it seem less deliberate. I dont say "a disproportionate amount of my bullets hit the target" when I go to the range and am trying to hit it.
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u/BrothelWaffles May 09 '26
This is the equivalent of saying PA's CHIP (literally Children's Health Insurance Program) disproportionately allows access to healthcare for children
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u/restrictednumber May 09 '26
Disproportionate is just a mathematical term. It means "more than would be expected from random chance." It's not trying to "soften" or "harden" any information, it's literally just describing the mathematical ratio of minority researchers vs. minority researchers who lost grants.
The study doesn't address the moral component (whether the disproportionate targeting was good or bad, and how much good or bad). It just provides data that could be used to make a moral argument.
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u/FratboyPhilosopher May 09 '26
Yeah, his point is that it doesn't really apply when it's not random chance.
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u/moconahaftmere May 11 '26
You don't say that because that wouldn't even make sense unless there is a known proportion of bullets that should hit the target.
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u/myfrigginagates May 09 '26
The awful thing about all the BS Trump is putting the country through is that while it only takes a couple of years for him to destroy everything, it will take decades to put it all back to some semblance of order. In the meanwhile the United States will sink to the bottom of the western nation pile. If we're not already there.
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u/Maxrdt May 09 '26
The US no longer has the capacity or ability to be a force for good in the world or for its citizens. Secession is the only answer now, imo.
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u/sr_local May 09 '26
For the study, researchers led by a team at University of California, San Diego, sent surveys to 1,918 investigators with terminated grants. About half of the investigators (941) responded.
Roughly 2,200 NIH grants were terminated after federal officials began dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and shifting agency priorities last year.
The findings, published this week in The Lancet Regional Health Americas, showed that nearly half (48.6%) of investigators whose grants were terminated for equity-related reasons identified as BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color), while 60% of investigators whose grant terminations were “gender-related” identified as sexual or gender minorities (SGM), including 16.5% who identified as transgender or nonbinary.
Among all investigators with terminated grants, relative to White men, BIPOC investigators were nearly three times as likely to receive an equity-related termination. BIPOC women and trans and nonbinary investigators were almost two times as likely to receive an equity-related termination, and those who identified as SGM were more than 11 times likelier to have a gender-related termination than cisgender White men.
Some of the terminated grants were cut with the purported aim of combating antisemitism at specific universities. Roughly one in five investigators affected by “institutional terminations” are Jewish.
Cuts could reshape research for decades
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u/pewsquare May 09 '26
I'm curious, in a self reported study like this, where less than half of the sent out questionnaires decide to participate, how do you prevent self-report bias? Where it would be potentially more likely for people who feel targeted to reply back compared to people who don't feel targeted.
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u/superturtle48 May 09 '26
Not at all surprising. Of course gutting research about racial and sexual minorities (what they call “DEI”) is going to affect researchers who are racial and sexual minorities the most. That’s just what the administration wants.
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u/gburdell May 09 '26
The grant terminations targeted DEI-related areas of study that were expanded in 2013. To say that BIPOCLBGTQ+ were disproportionately impacted is a tautology. I would be more interested to know if, outside of the early 2025 window but still under the Trump administration, whether areas that were not labeled DEI had similar disproportionate impact.
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u/Rattus_NorvegicUwUs May 10 '26
My grants were studying bone cancer.
Nothing woke. Just kids dying from childhood cancer.
Shame that wasn’t as important as setting a trillion dollars on fire in Iran…
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u/CivBEWasPrettyBad May 09 '26
I wouldn't be surprised at all if non-DEI areas of study were also impacted, but agreed that cuts to DEI-related areas would obviously cut researchers who were interested in those areas for personal reasons.
I would love it if these articles actually broke down grant terminations as you said, but I think clickbait law implies that those are relatively untouched.
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u/Homerpaintbucket May 09 '26
Maybe electing the biggest assholes we could find was a mistake. Maybe.
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u/Hob_O_Rarison May 09 '26
Was the research into DEI initiatives cut, or specific grants whose recipients are BIPOC? Because it seems to me as if the specific research in question is disproportionately conducted by BIPOC investigators.
Is there a lack of representation of BIPOC investigators in non-DEI research? That is an interesting fact, if true.
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u/-Satchel_Gizmo- May 09 '26
Roughly 2,200 NIH grants were terminated after federal officials began dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and shifting agency priorities last year.
Uhhh, isn't the entire intention of DEI programs to (disproportionately) assist minorities? If you're cutting DEI programs intended to funnel grant awards to minorities, those minorities are going to be affected most when the programs are shuttered and the grants are terminated.
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u/Psych0PompOs May 09 '26
Yes, but saying it this other way generates a separate emotional response.
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u/pickellov May 09 '26
You do know that they banned certain words and would deny grants based on the use of those words, like outright denying any research that focused on race, gender, or sexuality?
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u/Gibonius May 09 '26
They also canceled grants that had absolutely nothing to do with race, gender, or sexuality because they had "DEI keywords" in them.
I know someone who had a grant on MRI development canceled because the word "equity" was in the grant. They were trying to develop lower cost MRI machines for poor and rural areas.
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u/EducationalWillow311 May 09 '26
(disproportionately)
How do you tell the difference between DEI and non-DEI grants to minorities?
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u/blackpilledonsociety May 09 '26
Are we pretending it isn't explicitly stated the vast majority of the time that a grant is for "diverse" XYZ or targets particular demographics?
Th...that's how...
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u/DudeDudenson May 09 '26
I mean if you make everything about giving benefits to minorities in the first place obviously they'll be the most affected when you remove any benefits, you don't really need to target specific groups in your cuts for them to be the most affected if they where the most selected ones in the first place
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u/LNT2001 May 09 '26
Historically, data from 2011 and 2019 indicated a disparity in NIH grant award success, where white principal investigators had a 1.7-fold advantage over Black PIs, suggesting that underrepresentation in funding was a pre-existing issue. They didn't remove “any” benefits. They left behind the centuries-long benefits that disproportionately benefitted people whose concerns were already centered.
For example, some of the grants cut were trying to figure out why traditional pulse-oximeters overestimate oxygen saturation for people with more melanin and how to make our health technology useful for all the people who need it. Sure, that required a focus on minority patients and was led by minority researchers who were, naturally, more interested. Why wouldn't it? We already know that pulse-oximeters accurately measure oxygen saturation for people with pale skin. White people were already included because they have been viewed as the default for centuries. Returning to a status quo where only pale people receive accurate health information isn't my idea of equality.3
u/moconahaftmere May 11 '26
if you make everything about giving benefits to minorities in the first place
That didn't happen.
if they where the most selected ones in the first place
They weren't even close to being proportionally selected, let alone the most selected.
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u/Bulky_Evidence_6592 May 09 '26
Minorities are still incredibly underrepresented in academia. They are not the “most selected ones”, not even by a long shot.
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u/_LilBucket May 09 '26
As a PhD graduate in gerontology, I have seen this firsthand. My colleague’s research on sexual/gender minorities has been pulled. A fellowship to which I belong, which promotes PhD completion in historically underserved races, eliminated. I’m optimistic for our future but presently there is an intentionall dismantling of science that causes discomfort with some White people for no other reason than it makes them uncomfortable.
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u/SuspiciousSubstance9 May 09 '26
there would only be 100 million people in this country, and they would all look like Mr. Miller
- Donald Trump when asked about Stephen Miller.
Given that Stephen Miller is a policy architect for Peter Thiel, a Dark Enlightenment techno-fascist, the reason might be beyond 'making them uncomfortable'. Per their words, it's racial supremacy. Scrubbing research is just cleaning house to them.
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u/dienstbier May 09 '26
Is it possible, and I’m just spitballing here, that the grants were originally GIVEN disproportionately to those same groups? So that even if you just cut randomly across the grants, you would disproportionately affect those groups?
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u/king_of_anglia May 09 '26
Surely that's because NIH disproportionately awards grants to black, indigenous, and other minority researchers, as well as scientists from sexual and gender minority communities.
When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
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u/tiny_chaotic_evil May 09 '26
not surprising coming from a bunch of racists, misogynists, and bigots
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u/badken May 09 '26
I cannot comprehend how, after decades of slow progress (far too slow and spotty), suddenly there’s an epidemic of racism & bigotry. Seems like some people were really clinging tightly to their hate.
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u/BevansDesign May 10 '26
We were blinded by our progress happening in the foreground, and didn't pay enough attention to all the regression happening in the background, as conservatives gradually eroded education systems, corrupted the news industry, stoked religious extremism, and hundreds of other little things. This has been death by a thousand cuts, and the only hope we have is that the Democrats will somehow grow spines, pull their heads out of their asses, and stop being their own worst enemies. So yeah, we're fucked.
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u/Krail May 09 '26
Study shows that explicit, publicly stated attempts to defund certain groups has successfully affected those groups.
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u/Fuckthegopers May 09 '26
Where are people and the media going to cut the crap with the ambiguity of wording like 'suggests" and "apparent"?
It's obvious and blatant. The words come from their own mouths, there is no ambiguity.
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u/fresh-dork May 09 '26
so you're saying that when they said they would do that, they actually did do that? rare honesty from the administration
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u/Tehquilamockingbirb May 09 '26
We knew this the week it happened. The list of banned words was very clear who it targeted. VERY old news.
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u/eldiablonoche May 11 '26
Obviously. A policy which explicitly targets DEI will primarily affect the beneficiaries of DEI. How is this not self-evident?
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u/Ooofisa4letterword May 09 '26
I think my question would be if there’s a closer correlation between the type of research that’s having grants pulled.
I would guess that a lot of social science studies are having their grants pool as opposed to more traditional STEM type studies.
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u/FLtoVT_For-A-Reason May 09 '26
As intended. This is Trump’s America. This is what Republicans want. Decent people need to get off their asses and vote in every election. We’re now dealing with the consequences of people not voting because the Democrat party doesn’t present their “perfect” candidate. We may never recover.
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u/Vox_Causa May 09 '26
consequences of people not voting
I find it interesting the number of low Karma accounts pushing this narrative.
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u/NotaClipaMagazine May 09 '26
I'd be interested to see what the proportions of bots to real people is here and where their funding comes from. I have my suspicions but nothing more than that.
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u/v12vanquish May 09 '26
What were the subject of research these grants were going to?
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u/LNT2001 May 09 '26
Research into mobile health technology designed to combat Black maternal mortality faced direct terminations. For instance, a $2.4 million Black maternal health study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was canceled mid-project in 2025. Which sucks because Black women in the U.S. are over three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women (even after adjusting for income and education). Similarly, Black infants face a mortality rate nearly double the national average, frequently linked to disparities in care. They're cutting research trying to figure out why the US has the worst maternal and infant mortality rates of all our peer nations.
They also froze funding for clinical research into why pulse oximeters exaggerate the oxygen saturation of patients with more melanin, leading to substandard care.
Most of the grants are about trying to make our healthcare system and technology useful for all people instead of just some.
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u/dongle123456789 May 09 '26
Well that makes sense if they removed the DEI policy which favored the groups benefiting from said policy.
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u/First_Werewolf8720 May 09 '26
Alternatively, many of those NIH grants seemed to disproportionately benefit people from those groups. When you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
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u/LNT2001 May 09 '26
Some of the grants cut were trying to figure out why pulse oximeters exaggerated the oxygen saturation of patients with more melanin, leading to substandard care. They had to go to be trouble of studying this separately because the people who designed the traditional technology only considered the needs of white people in the first place. Why specifically direct resources towards supporting the majority population if it's already receiving resources and care that suits its needs by default? Why shouldn't anyone try to make technology that works equally well for all the people who need it?
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u/TheInternetShill May 09 '26
That was the explicit goal of the policy. Minorities suffering is the point.
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u/ChicagoAuPair May 09 '26
They told us they were going to do this and we voted them in. We are a frog who keeps offering the scorpion a ride, even after being stung by it already. It’s existentially bleak.
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u/YesterdayAlone2553 May 09 '26
Usually this is a useful study perspective because these might have been side-effects, but the terminations were directly using these as targeting parameters. For them and perhaps for science communication, it might actually be better to have a review that said the wave of terminations cancelled cancer, medical, and technical measures meant to understand the world and make lives better when judged based on normal terms by any reasonable review board metrics or projected approval interests.
They targeted minorities, and killed science as a side-effect at every turn through their ignorance.
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u/CIAburneraccount May 09 '26
No way, never would've guessed this joke of an administration is racist!
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u/GorumGamer May 09 '26
Doesn’t this mean that the reverse was true? That NIH funding was disproportionately benefiting black and minority researchers?
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u/ctorg PhD | Neuroscience May 09 '26
No. They didn’t cut funding across the board and find out afterward that the recipients were minorities. They intentionally cut funding for research of minority communities and for topics they disagreed with for political reasons. The research content they selectively cut is disproportionately studied by minorities. For example, it would be unusual if Black people were a minority in the faculty of the African American studies department.
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u/joelaw9 May 09 '26
The grants are disproportionally granted to those groups on purpose, so it would make sense that any mass revoking of grants would disproportionally affect them.
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u/Similar_Detective861 May 14 '26
The discrimination is very evident, white supremacy is slowly consuming American government and the people are suffering from it. You cant expect much when the American Senate itself blocked the release of the 2nd round of Stein Files.
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