As the Trump administration slashes and transforms the National Institutes of Health (NIH), minority health researchers are walking a tightrope, trying to maintain funding without crossing the vague line into “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) projects.

Researchers told The Hill they are facing unclear research directives, increasingly competitive grant awards and politicized peer review processes as they battle to sustain their work improving health outcomes for minority populations.

“The rules are being changed all the time. The communication is not clear. Study sections [are] getting paused,” said Samira Asgari, a tenure-track assistant professor at the Institute for Genomic Health at Oakland School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “This brings just an environment of lack of stability and uncertainty.”

While many minority health research projects have seen their grants terminated, others managed to scrape by with funding intact. But to financially sustain their research, scientists have sought alternate funding sources or changed their grant application strategies entirely.

“This is going to basically harm science, because getting a grant becomes a lot more competitive,” Asgari said. “It's already a numbers game, and even the best of the proposals, for all sorts of reasons, may not get funded.”

Trump terminations target minority health research

The Trump administration directed agencies to terminate DEI programs and grants earlier in the year, resulting in the cancellation of several hundred NIH grants.

“There was no specific type of institution that was spared,” said Michael Liu, a resident physician at Massachusetts General Hospital. “We saw public and private institutions affected across the United States.”

However, Liu and other researchers found certain NIH institutes had more funding terminated than others. The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, endured the most cuts during the initial round of terminations — more than $505 million and $223 million, respectively.

The Supreme Court greenlit the Trump administration’s continued termination of NIH funding in August, though separate legal challenges managed to disparately preserve some grants.

Though the Senate rejected the administration’s proposed cuts to the NIH and preserved the agency’s $48 billion budget, the White House instated a forward funding........

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