“The Trump administration is weaponizing federal research funding to suppress disfavored views, pressuring scientists to censor their work or risk losing funding for research that might produce results that don’t conform to the administration’s ideology,” ACLU Racial Justice Program attorney Olga Akselrod said.
A coalition of researchers has filed a class-action lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health, claiming that the Trump administration is attempting to block funding and cancel scientific grants for projects it finds politically disagreeable.
According to The Guardian, the Trump administration uses a list of 235 keywords—which include terms like “gender” and “racist”—to discourage research on topics ranging from health equity to climate change.
The NIH, a U.S. government organization, is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.
“Our study on Alzheimer’s disease was designed to better understand how to identify and reduce the risk of dementia in communities who are at high risk of developing the disease, who have been historically understudied,” said Ann Cohen, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.
“For more than a decade, our team has built trusted relationships with communities that have too often been excluded from research, giving us critical information that can help improve early detection and treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, work that benefits everyone,” Cohen said in a press release announcing the lawsuit. “Losing this funding has forced us to abruptly cancel appointments for participants, preventing them from receiving promised research results, and slowing or stopping critical data analysis. This puts years of trust and scientific progress at risk.”
The lawsuit, filed in a San Francisco-based court on Wednesday, is backed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Science in Public Interest, among other groups.
Attorneys claim that the Trump administration’s selective termination of grants likely runs afoul of the First Amendment by censoring speech with which the current government disagrees.
“The Trump administration is weaponizing federal research funding to suppress disfavored views, pressuring scientists to censor their work or risk losing funding for research that might produce results that don’t conform to the administration’s ideology,” ACLU Racial Justice Program attorney Olga Akselrod said. “While the NIH can make calls about what topics to fund, it cannot do so in a manner that is inconsistent with governing statutes and regulations. The first amendment also ensures the NIH cannot screen out projects or applicants because it thinks they’ll express views the government does not like. The NIH has crossed each of these lines.”
The lawsuit notes the administration’s screening of grants applies to studies that have already withstood peer review.
“Scientists should not have to scrub their research to obtain federal funding,” said Arghavan Salles, a surgeon and associate professor at Stanford. In a press release, Salles said that her grant on sexual harassment in biomedical research was terminated for being “DEI-related.”
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, has yet to respond to media requests for comment.
Sources
New lawsuit accuses Trump administration of blocking NIH grants as form of censorship
Scientists challenge US NIH grant screening as unconstitutional
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