Tag: 2024 election
Kennedy's Ruinous Science Funding Choices Will Devastate Red States

Kennedy's Ruinous Science Funding Choices Will Devastate Red States

The National Institutes of Health’s sweeping cuts of grants that fund scientific research are inflicting pain almost universally across the U.S., including in most states that backed President Donald Trump in the 2024 election.

A KFF Health News analysis underscores that the terminations are sparing no part of the country, politically or geographically. About 40% of organizations whose grants the NIH cut in its first month of slashing, which started Feb. 28, are in states Trump won in November.

The Trump administration has singled out Ivy League universities including Columbia and Harvard for broad federal funding cuts. But the spending reductions at the NIH, the nation’s foremost source of funding for biomedical research, go much further: Of about 220 organizations that had grants terminated, at least 94 were public universities, including flagship state schools in places such as Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Nebraska, and Texas.

The Trump administration has canceled hundreds of grants supporting research on topics such as vaccination; diversity, equity, and inclusion; and the health of LGBTQ+ populations. Some of the terminations are a result of Trump’s executive orders to abandon federal work on diversity and equity issues. Others followed the Senate confirmation of anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH. Many mirror the ambitions laid out in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, the far-right playbook for Trump’s second term.

Affected researchers say Trump administration officials are taking a cudgel to efforts to improve the lives of people who often experience worse health outcomes — ignoring a scientific reality that diseases and other conditions do not affect all Americans equally.

KFF Health News found that the NIH terminated about 780 grants or parts of grants between Feb. 28 and March 28, based on documents published by the Department of Health and Human Services and a list maintained by academic researchers. Some grants were canceled in full, while in other cases, only supplements — extra funding related to the main grant, usually for a shorter-term, related project — were terminated.

Among U.S. recipients, 96 of the institutions that lost grants in the first month are in politically conservative states including Florida, Ohio, and Indiana, where Republicans control the state government or voters reliably support the GOP in presidential campaigns, or in purple states such as North Carolina, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that were presidential battleground states. An additional 124 institutions are in blue states.

Sybil Hosek, a research professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, helps run a network that focuses on improving care for people 13 to 24 years old who are living with or at risk for HIV. The NIH awarded Florida State University $73 million to lead the HIV project.

“We never thought they would destroy an entire network dedicated to young Americans,” said Hosek, one of the principal investigators of the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network for HIV/AIDS Interventions. The termination “doesn’t make sense to us.”

NIH official Michelle Bulls is director of the Office of Policy for Extramural Research Administration, which oversees grants policy and compliance across NIH institutes. In terminating the grant March 21, Bulls wrote that research “based primarily on artificial and nonscientific 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.”

Adolescents and young adults ages 13 to 24 accounted for 1 in 5 new HIV infections in the U.S. in 2022, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“It’s science in its highest form,” said Lisa Hightow-Weidman, a professor at Florida State University who co-leads the network. “I don’t think we can make America healthy again if we leave youth behind.”

HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said in an emailed statement that “NIH is taking action to terminate research funding that is not aligned with NIH and HHS priorities.” The NIH and the White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.

“As we begin to Make America Healthy Again, it's important to prioritize research that directly affects the health of Americans. We will leave no stone unturned in identifying the root causes of the chronic disease epidemic as part of our mission to Make America Healthy Again,” Hilliard said.

Harm to HIV, Vaccine Studies

The NIH, with its nearly $48 billion annual budget, is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world, awarding nearly 59,000 grants in the 2023 fiscal year. The Trump administration has upended funding for projects that were already underway, stymied money for new applications, and sought to reduce how much recipients can spend on overhead expenses.

Those changes — plus the firing of 1,200 agency employees as part of mass layoffs across the government — are alarming scientists and NIH workers, who warn that they will undermine progress in combating diseases and other threats to the nation’s public health. On April 2, the American Public Health Association, Ibis Reproductive Health, and affected researchers, among others, filed a lawsuit in federal court against the NIH and HHS to halt the grant cancellations.

Two National Cancer Institute employees, who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press and feared retaliation, said its staff receives batches of grants to terminate almost daily. On Feb. 27, the cancer institute had more than 10,800 active projects, the highest share of the NIH’s roughly two dozen institutes and centers, according to the NIH’s website. At least 47 grants that NCI awarded were terminated in the first month.

Kennedy has said the NIH should take a years-long pause from funding infectious disease research. In November 2023, he told an anti-vaccine group, “I’m gonna say to NIH scientists, ‘God bless you all. Thank you for public service. We’re going to give infectious disease a break for about eight years,’” according to NBC News.

For years, Kennedy has peddled falsehoods about vaccines — including that “no vaccine” is “safe and effective,” and that “there are other studies out there” showing a connection between vaccines and autism, a link that has repeatedly been debunked — and claimed falsely that HIV is not the only cause of AIDS.

KFF Health News found that grants in blue states were disproportionately affected, making up roughly two-thirds of terminated grants, many of them at Columbia University. The university had more grants terminated than all organizations in politically red states combined. On April 4, Democratic attorneys general in 16 states sued HHS and the NIH to block the agency from canceling funds.

Researchers whose funding was stripped said they stopped clinical trials and other work on improving care for people with HIV, reducing vaping and smoking rates among LGBTQ+ teens and young adults, and increasing vaccination rates for young children. NIH grants routinely span several years.

For example, Hosek said that when the youth HIV/AIDS network’s funding was terminated, she and her colleagues were preparing to launch a clinical trial examining whether a particular antibiotic that is effective for men to prevent sexually transmitted infections would also work for women.

“This is a critically important health initiative focused on young women in the United States,” she said. “Without that study, women don’t have access to something that men have.”

Other scientists said they were testing how to improve health outcomes among newborns in rural areas with genetic abnormalities, or researching how to improve flu vaccination rates among Black children, who are more likely to be hospitalized and die from the virus than non-Hispanic white children.

“It's important for people to know that — if, you know, they are wondering if this is just a waste of time and money. No, no. It was a beautiful and rare thing that we did,” said Joshua Williams, a pediatric primary care doctor at Denver Health in Colorado who was researching whether sharing stories about harm experienced due to vaccine-preventable diseases — from missed birthdays to hospitalizations and job loss — might inspire caregivers to get their children vaccinated against the flu.

He and his colleagues had recruited 200 families, assembled a community advisory board to understand which vaccinations were top priorities, created short videos with people who had experienced vaccine-preventable illness, and texted those videos to half of the caregivers participating in the study.

They were just about to crack open the medical records and see if it had worked: Were the group who received the videos more likely to follow through on vaccinations for their children? That’s when he got the notice from the NIH.

“It is the policy of NIH not to prioritize research activities that focuses gaining scientific knowledge on why individuals are hesitant to be vaccinated and/or explore ways to improve vaccine interest and commitment,” the notice read.

Williams said the work was already having an impact as other institutions were using the idea to start projects related to cancer and dialysis.

A Hit to Rural Health

Congress previously tried to ensure that NIH grants also went to states that historically have had less success obtaining biomedical research funding from the government. Now those places aren’t immune to the NIH’s terminations.

Sophia Newcomer, an associate professor of public health at the University of Montana, said she had 18 months of work left on a study examining undervaccination among infants, which means they were late in receiving recommended childhood vaccines or didn’t receive the vaccines at all. Newcomer had been analyzing 10 years of CDC data about children’s vaccinations and had already found that most U.S. infants from 0 to 19 months old were not adequately vaccinated.

Her grant was terminated March 10, with the NIH letter stating the project “no longer effectuates agency priorities,” a phrase replicated in other termination letters KFF Health News has reviewed.

“States like Montana don’t get a lot of funding for health research, and health researchers in rural areas of the country are working on solutions to improve rural health care,” Newcomer said. “And so cuts like this really have an impact on the work we’re able to do.”

Montana is one of 23 states, along with Puerto Rico, that are eligible for the NIH’s Institutional Development Award program, meant to bolster NIH funding in states that historically have received less investment. Congress established the program in 1993.

The NIH’s grant terminations hit institutions in 15 of those states, more than half that qualify, plus Puerto Rico.

Researchers Can’t ‘Just Do It Again Later’

The NIH’s research funds are deeply entrenched in the U.S. health care system and academia. Rarely does an awarded grant stay within the four walls of a university that received it. One grant’s money is divvied up among other universities, hospitals, community nonprofits, and other government agencies, researchers said.

Erin Kahle, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, said she was working with Emory University in Georgia and the CDC as part of her study. She was researching the impact of intimate partner violence on HIV treatment among men living with the virus. “They are relying on our funds, too,” she said.

Kahle said her top priority was to ethically and safely wind down her nationwide study, which included 418 people, half of whom were still participating when her grant was terminated in late March. Kahle said that includes providing resources to participants for whom sharing experiences of intimate partner violence may cause trauma or mental health distress.

Rachel Hess, the co-director of the Clinical & Translational Science Institute at the University of Utah, said the University of Nevada-Reno and Intermountain Health, one of the largest hospital systems in the West, had received funds from a $38 million grant that was awarded to the University of Utah and was terminated March 12.

The institute, which aims to make scientific research more efficient to speed up the availability of treatments for patients, supported over 5,000 projects last year, including 550 clinical trials with 7,000 participants. Hess said that, for example, the institute was helping design a multisite study involving people who have had heart attacks to figure out the ideal mix of medications “to keep them alive” before they get to the hospital, a challenge that’s more acute in rural communities.

After pushback from the university — the institute’s projects included work to reduce health care disparities between rural and urban areas — the NIH restored its grant March 29.

Among the people the Utah center thanked in its announcement about the reversal were the state’s congressional delegation, which consists entirely of Republican lawmakers. “We are grateful to University of Utah leadership, the University of Utah Board of Trustees, our legislative delegation, and the Utah community for their support,” it said.

Hilliard, of HHS, said that “some grants have been reinstated following the appeals process, and the agency will continue to carry out the remaining appeals as planned to determine their alignment.” She declined to say how many had been reinstated, or why the University of Utah grant was among them.

Other researchers haven’t had the same luck. Kahle, in Michigan, said projects like hers can take a dozen years from start to finish — applying for and receiving NIH funds, conducting the research, and completing follow-up work.

“Even if there are changes in the next administration, we’re looking at at least a decade of setting back the research,” Kahle said. “It’s not as easy as like, ‘OK, we’ll just do it again later.’ It doesn’t really work that way.”

Methodology

KFF Health News analyzed National Institutes of Health grant data to determine the states and organizations most affected by the Trump administration’s cuts.

We tallied the number of terminated NIH grants using two sources: a Department of Health and Human Services list of terminated grants published April 4; and a crowdsourced list maintained by Noam Ross of rOpenSci and Scott Delaney of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, as of April 8. We focused on the first month of terminations: from Feb. 28 to March 28. We found that 780 awards were terminated in total, with 770 of them going to recipients based in U.S. states and two to recipients in Puerto Rico.

The analysis does not account for potential grant reinstatements, which we know happened in at least one instance.

Additional information on the recipients, such as location and business type, came from the USAspending.gov Award Data Archive.

There were 222 U.S. recipients in total. At least 94 of them were public higher education institutions. Forty-one percent of organizations that had NIH grants cut in the first month were in states that President Donald Trump won in the 2024 election.

Some recipients, including the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, are medical facilities associated with higher education institutions. We classified these as hospitals/medical centers.

We also wanted to see whether the grant cuts affected states across the political spectrum. We generally classified states as blue if Democrats control the state government or Democratic candidates won them in the last three presidential elections, and red if they followed this pattern but for Republicans. Purple states are generally presidential battleground states or those where voters regularly split their support between the two parties: Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Wisconsin. The result was 25 red states, 17 blue states, and eight purple states. The District of Columbia was also blue.

We found that, of affected U.S. institutions, 96 were in red or purple states and 124 were in blue states.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

When The Far Right Gets What It Wants (And Feels Swindled)

When The Far Right Gets What It Wants (And Feels Swindled)

Here’s the problem with taking power: It’s up to you to run the thing that you are taking over. That is what Donald Trump and his followers and hangers on and cronies and fellow travelers face as we tick off the days until January 20. It isn’t even Day One yet, with Trump’s massively advertised plan to turn everything inside out with the stroke of his pen on a series of executive orders, and already the swamp-weasels are chewing on each other’s tails.

Have you been watching whatever is going on with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy? The two of them, having billionaire-bulldozed their way into Trump’s inner circle, have discovered that it’s filled with fools and ignoramuses. And oh, my goodness! Who’s that over there in the mirror? Why it’s us!

It seems that the two billionaire geniuses failed to notify Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon and the MAGA faithful of their plan to continue running their own personal Department of Immigration for the Following People. We’re talking here of the H-1B visa program which allows employers to hire skilled foreign workers, supposedly when their skills are not available in the American workforce.

According to CNN, Musk’s Tesla corporation has sought and received permission to hire more than 2,000 foreign workers under the H-1B program, and so have two of his other businesses, X and Neuralink. According to the Department of Labor, in 2023 alone, Trump requested and received H-2B visas for non-skilled workers that included seven hotel desk clerks, 17 housekeeping cleaners, 53 waiters and waitresses, 24 cooks, five first-line supervisors of food preparation and serving workers, and five bartenders.

Just couldn’t find any locals in Florida to change beds, swab out toilets, check-in guests, and prepare rubber chicken dinners at Mar-a-Lago.

So, Musk is all in with the H-1B program, posting this on X on Friday: “The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla, and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is H1B. Take a big step back and FUCK YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

Let’s leave aside for the moment Musk’s plagiaristic usage of Trumpian “likes of which” language and his obvious elitist contempt for those attempting to read what he wrote and have a look at the fallout.

Miller and Bannon and Laura Loomer and a rather large smattering of what passes for the MAGA intelligentsia acted dumbstruck. What happened to what we might call “the whole immigration thing?” The idea that it’s time to “close the borders” and “hire American” and “America First” and practically every other slogan Trump ran on?

Trash heap of history, apparently.

So, now we know they’re against immigration but for it when it comes to exploiting low skilled and highly skilled foreign workers both for their personal companies and the companies of their cronies. What else is on the menu?

They’re against shipping jobs off to Mexico and Indonesia and India and Pakistan except when their friends own the companies doing the out-sourcing. They’re against vaccinations except for themselves and their children. They’re against the NIH and egghead scientists except when they come down with diseases like pancreatic cancer for which there are now designer mRNA vaccines that can be customized for individual patients who can afford them. They’re against women in combat until they need female soldiers to question and search female prisoners of war and gain intelligence from women in Muslim countries who are forbidden from even speaking with a man who is not their husband.

And of course they’re against abortion, except when an inconvenient pregnancy crops up in their own lives. Take for example arch-conservative Rep. Scott DesJarlais of Tennessee, who pressured his mistress to get an abortion and arranged and paid for two abortions for his wife, according to transcripts from his divorce proceedings…according to the wife who had the two abortions.

It's only the beginning. Just wait until Trump gets going on “drill, baby, drill” on public lands. There will be whining and pissing and moaning and even lawsuits from right-wing billionaires whose zillion dollar ranches back up on national forests and public grazing lands. Trump’s plans to cancel tax credits for electric cars and solar panels are already running up against…you guessed it…Elon Musk, who sells electric cars and batteries that store power produced by home solar panels.

The entire Trump plan for his second presidency is based on cancelling fairness – in employment, college admissions, distribution of funds for disaster relief and basic programs like agriculture subsidies, school breakfasts and lunches, healthcare, and that’s just for starters. They’ve got Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security in their gunsights, too.

What happens when fairness goes out the door? Why, it’s replaced with cronyism, payoffs, nepotism, corruption right up to and including bribery and blackmail. Remember how Trump burned through cabinet secretary scandals in the opening months and years of his first term? Buckle your seatbelts. The crew he has nominated this time are a whole new category of horror-story.

We’re in for quite a ride.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. You can subscribe to his daily columns at luciantruscott.substack.com and follow him on Twitter @LucianKTruscott and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.


Hakeem Jeffries

If Not For Swing State's GOP Gerrymander, Democrats Would Control House

While Democrats lost control of the White House and the Senate in the 2024 election, they might well have flipped control of the House of Representatives were it not for a controversial move by Republican lawmakers in one battleground state.

In a Wednesday tweet, Rep. Wiley Nickel (D-NC) claimed that "North Carolina's gerrymandered maps changed the nation." The freshman congressman — who announced in 2023 that he would not seek a second term — further argued: "The three seats stolen from Democrats (mine included) cost Democrats control of the U.S. House of Representatives."

"Without a brutal mid-census NC GOP gerrymander @RepJeffries would be the next Speaker in a 218-217 House," Nickel added, mentioning the official handle of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) in his tweet.

Nickel's opinion was also shared by NBC News reporter Sahil Kapur, who posted to Bluesky that the current partisan makeup of the House as of this week stands at 220 Republican seats and 214 Democratic seats. In the one contest yet to be decided in California's 13th Congressional District, Rep. John Duarte (R-CA is narrowly trailing his Democratic opponent Adam Gray by roughly 200 votes. If Gray prevails, that would put Democrats at 215 seats.

However, the House's Republican majority becomes even more tenuous after the 119th Congress is sworn in on January 3. At that point, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) will officially leave the House. When President-elect Donald Trump is inaugurated on January 20, Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) will join his administration as National Security Advisor. And if Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), currently House Republican Conference chair, is confirmed as the next U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, the GOP could end up with the tiniest of majorities.

"Could be a 220-215 majority, which shrinks to 217-215 early 2025 when you subtract Gaetz, Stefanik, Waltz," Kapur wrote. "The GOP gerrymander in North Carolina (flipped 3 Dem seats) saved their majority."

The gerrymander went through last fall, when North Carolina Republicans ignored court-drawn maps in 2022 to propose new redistricting maps that effectively turned four previously Democratic districts into districts that heavily favored Republicans. Even though Democratic Governor Roy Cooper vetoed the maps, the GOP supermajority overrode him, making the maps official for the 2024 election.

Lindsey Prather, a Democratic lawmaker in the Tar Heel State, blasted her Republican colleagues in a tweet, and called for an independent redistricting process to propose fairer maps.

""I want to take a second & acknowledge the sheer insanity that is [North Carolina politics]," Rep. Prather posted. "We need nonpartisan, independent redistricting. We shouldn't be waiting w/bated breath for maps that were drawn in secret. This shouldn't be exciting. It should be a boring thing that happens every 10 years."

The new maps will likely remain in place until after the 2030 Census. However, Democrats were able to break the Republican supermajority in the Tar Heel State legislature this November despite Republicans' wins at the federal level. And Attorney General Josh Stein won North Carolina's gubernatorial election, keeping the governor's mansion in Democratic hands through at least 2028.

Reprinted with permission from Alternet.

No, Donald Trump Didn't Win This Election By A 'Landslide'

No, Donald Trump Didn't Win This Election By A 'Landslide'

As the tallying of votes approaches finality, with no happy outcome for Democrats, the triumphal narrative proclaimed by Republican cheerleaders needs correction. There was no MAGA “landslide” on Election Night – unless, like so many other aspects of American life, we have decided to diminish what that term has always meant historically.

Donald Trump appears to have won the popular vote by just over two percent, according to the latest numbers published by the Cook Political Report, which netted him 312 electoral votes. While that represented a big improvement on Trump’s weak record in presidential runs (and certainly warrants deep Democratic introspection), it was far from anything that could be defined as a landslide. In California, where Kamala Harris won the state with nearly 60 percent, there are still more than three million votes yet to be tallied..

So let's nudge the Republicans and their media cheerleaders back toward reality.

The last time that a Republican presidential candidate achieved what we have traditionally called a landslide was in 1988, when George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis by eight percent of the popular vote and won more than 400 electoral votes. Ronald Reagan notched two landslide victories: the first in 1980, when he beat incumbent Jimmy Carter by more than nine percent in the popular vote and nabbed 489 electoral votes (although Carter was hobbled by the third-party candidacy of John Anderson, who got nearly seven percent); and the second four years later, when he crushed Walter Mondale with nearly 59 percent of the popular vote and carried every state except the Democrat’s Minnesota home.

And let’s not forget Richard Nixon’s similar trouncing of George McGovern in 1972, when the Republican won 520 electoral votes and 61 percent of the popular vote. (Tricky Dick resigned in disgrace two years later when after revelations about his cheating in that election and numerous other crimes.) Democrats have won big too, notably in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson won 486 electoral votes and more than 61 percent. The last Democratic victory that approached a landslide came in 1996, when Bill Clinton won reelection with 379 electoral votes and came in nine points ahead in the popular vote against the incumbent Bush (who also had to contend with self-funding third-party gadfly Ross Perot).

So no, Trump’s roughly two percentage points do not place him in that category. It’s scarcely more than half as big as President Joe Biden’s margin in 2020, which the MAGA Republicans have repeatedly insisted was no victory at all. Democrats are far more gracious losers (and winners) than the Trump Republicans, who don’t hesitate to threaten and employ violence when they don’t get their way. (Notice how all the pre-election claims of “fraud” suddenly vanish when they win?)

Whatever the final numbers say, this election was assuredly disastrous for the Democrats, the nation, and the world. The damage has only just begun and the recovery remains distant and uncertain. Yet there many signs that the Republican narrative is too simple and simply wrong – from the Senate races that Democrats won in four of the five battleground states to the ballot initiatives where Republican ideologues were defeated on paid family leave, private school vouchers, and especially abortion rights.

The other cliché that Republicans keep repeating as they yammer about their pseudo- landslide is “mandate.” But having lied about their intentions, pretending to disown the authoritarian Project 2025 agenda that they now openly embrace, they have no mandate.

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