Students, researchers and demonstrators protest the Trump administration's funding cuts on research, health and higher education at the University of California Los Angeles.ROBYN BECK/AFP/Getty Images
Emily Dworkin, Ph.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and an associate professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Washington or its affiliates.
Over the past four months, the U.S. federal government has made deep cuts to National Institutes of Health (NIH) research funding. That funding is a high-yield investment: in 2024, it supported 400,000 jobs and generated US$2.56 in economic activity for every US$1 spent. However, at least US$3.7-billion in funding for active NIH grants has already been revoked. A proposed 43-per-cent cut to NIH’s budget looms.
My grant termination notice came in an e-mail on a Friday at 3 p.m. in late March. It contained a boilerplate message saying that studies on “artificial and non-scientific categories … 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.”
This was a surprising assertion. As an expert in trauma recovery, I know that enhancing health requires studying demographic subgroups because health problems are often more common in specific subgroups. Post-traumatic stress disorder, associated with an annual U.S. economic burden of more than US$200-billion, is three times more common in women than men and two times more common in sexual minority women than heterosexual women.
As Congress recognized when it passed laws requiring NIH to fund research on health disparities in sexual minorities and other populations, we can’t reduce the costs of these striking disparities if we don’t understand why they exist. This is why my terminated grant sought to understand the higher risk for trauma-related mental-health problems among sexual minority women. However, my grant was terminated more than two years early because of this focus.
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As I scrambled to shut down the study that Friday in March, I wondered, what’s the alternative? Should we ignore the massive differences in whom health problems affect, producing an incomplete understanding of possible solutions at best and an inaccurate understanding at worst?
Since then, I have told thousands of participants – women who had shared their most painful experiences with us – that I could no longer stand by the promises I made to them when they signed up. I have written the required final report to NIH without compensation or staff to help. I have accepted that little will come from two years of applying to get this grant and two ensuing years of working to meet its aims.
Since my position is grant-funded and I don’t have another two years to find another grant, I am counting down the days until the funding for my job and my team’s jobs runs out. If I cannot find alternate funding, I will enter a job market crowded with thousands of other newly unemployed scientists. Since scientists generally cannot leave faculty jobs and return, most of us will lose our academic careers. I have spent hours looking at my family’s budget and wondering how we will make ends meet.
But I have also kept close tabs on the lawsuit challenging these terminations. And last Monday, Judge William G. Young ruled that the terminations were “arbitrary and capricious.” This decision recognized that it had taken, in some cases, minutes to decide that dozens of in-progress grants on newly disfavoured topics should be revoked, without consideration of the contradiction with laws requiring funding of these topics, the harm that abrupt funding revocation causes to participants and scientific careers, or the waste of already-invested taxpayer money.
Then, the judge turned to what he described as a “darker element.” With obvious anger, he noted that the terminations clearly discriminated against racial minorities and LGBTQ individuals. In his 40-year career, he said, he had never seen a court record where discrimination was so palpable. I listened, crying.
This ruling is a victory for science, but its impact on my grant remains to be seen. I’m waiting to see whether the government abides by this ruling. It has not abided by similar rulings. And I’m running out of time.
I’m proud of my terminated grant. I’m proud that it supported 21 jobs in six states, and that its indirect costs – also a target of cuts – supported another 20 jobs. I’m proud that, in just 12 months, we enrolled 2,364 women representing every state in the U.S.
I’m proud of my career, and that I have spent 21 years trying to reduce suffering to the exclusion of all other professional endeavours. And most of all, I’m proud to be one of thousands of researchers who can say the same.
But being proud isn’t enough to enhance health and reduce illness. For that, we need funding.