Over the last few months, the Trump administration has directed federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation to cut funding for research with any connection to “diversity,” “equity” or “gender ideology.” The cuts have forced researchers across the country, including in Oregon, to stop their studies or scramble to locate alternative funding.
We’ll hear from three researchers whose federal grants were cancelled: Marguerita Lightfoot is a professor at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. Lauren Forrest is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. Tala Navab-Daneshmand is an associate professor of environmental engineering at Oregon State University.
They join us to talk about the negative impact the cuts will have on efforts to address health disparities in the U.S.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Over the last few months, the Trump administration has directed federal agencies, including the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, to cut funding for research, with a focus on work that has any connection to “diversity,” “equity” or so-called “gender ideology.” The cuts have forced researchers across the country, including in Oregon, to stop their studies or to scramble to allocate alternative funding.
I’m joined now by three of those researchers. Marguerita Lightfoot is a professor at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health. Lauren Forrest is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. Tala Navab-Daneshmand is an associate professor of environmental engineering at Oregon State University. It’s great to have all three of you on the show. Thanks very much for making time for us.
Marguerita Lightfoot: Thanks for having me.
Tala Navab-Daneshmand: Thanks for having us.
Miller: Marguerita Lightfoot, first – you’ve gone through NIH grant processes a number of times over the course of your career. Can you just give us a sense for what it’s normally like?
Lightfoot: Sure. Typically, you get an idea to address some kind of health condition, health problem. You write a grant, you submit it to NIH. There is a peer review process that your grant goes through, so at least three other folks read your grants, score it. There’s a panel of scientists who basically rank and score all of the grants that get submitted to NIH. And then that is used as the basis for recommending to NIH what grants get funded. NIH receives thousands of [grant applications] a year and they fund about 10% of them,
Miller: Once you go through that whole process, is there typically any concern about funding being pulled in the middle of, say, a five-year grant?
Lightfoot: It’s incredibly unusual. The only time that typically happened, if there was some kind of behavioral problem with the investigators or something ethical that happened. Or sometimes if you didn’t reach your targets for recruiting people into your study, NIH would give you a warning and say you have a little bit of time to actually increase the number of people that you are recruiting into the study to align with what you had proposed. But even then, having a grant canceled is incredibly unusual.
Miller: Lauren Forrest, what was the big question that you were trying to answer with your grant that was cut?
Lauren Forrest: I am trying to understand things that make people think about suicide or attempt suicide, and I was specifically trying to answer that question within rural lesbian, gay and bisexual people who seem to have different risks for suicidal thoughts and behaviors. We know that they have a lot higher rates of suicidal thoughts and behaviors, but we don’t totally know why that is. So my grant was really just trying to understand an answer to that “why” question, so that we can better intervene and give resources to high risk groups who might not have the right resources currently.
Miller: I just want to dig deeper because this the “why” behind the “why” seems crucial here. Why do you think that this is necessary research right now?
Forrest: Oh my goodness, I could go on and on about this. Across the board, LGBTQ people have rates of suicidal thoughts and behaviors that are three to nine times higher than rates in heterosexual people or cisgender people. But LGBTQ people are incredibly underrepresented in suicide research. So we have basically the highest risk group imaginable who we’re not doing anything to study, and we’re not doing nearly enough to help understand why and help prevent these devastating problems from happening.
Miller: How did you find out that you had lost funding?
Forrest: I got an email from someone at my institution who oversees the office of sponsored projects. That email had an attachment that had been emailed to that person saying that the grant had been terminated because it was based on gender ideology. Which wasn’t even true.
Miller: What do you mean by that?
Forrest: They said my research program was grounded in “gender ideology.” But my grant specifically was only studying people who identify as sexual minorities, so lesbian people, gay people, bisexual people, queer people. It didn’t have anything to do with gender identity. So even the reason that they gave for terminating the grant was actually not even relevant to the grant’s actual aims.
Miller: You were studying sexual orientation, had nothing to do with gender.
Forrest: Correct, yep.
Miller: How far along were you?
Forrest: I was about two months out from enrolling my first participant. So I had been spending the last several months, prior to the termination, getting all of the administrative things in order. That stuff takes time, especially when you’re studying suicide risk. You have to be really mindful, careful and ethical about the safety procedures that you are including. So it took a while to get all of that administrative stuff set up. I was truly going to start enrolling people around May or June. And the grant was terminated in late March.
Miller: I want to hear a lot more about what that’s meant for you, the people you still hope to study and the people you had been planning to work with.
As I noted, Tala Navab-Daneshmand is with us as well. We actually talked with you back in September after you received a grant. This was from the EPA, so not from NIH, to study antibiotic resistant bacteria in wastewater. But I’m guessing a lot of people either didn’t hear that conversation or may have forgotten some details from it. Can you remind us the big questions that you intended to answer?
Navab-Daneshmand: Our project was funded through a national priority program by the EPA. It was a nationwide study of looking at antibiotic resistance, which are when bacteria become resistant to antibiotic treatments and make it difficult to treat infections with antibiotics. We were looking at antibiotic resistance in wastewater systems across the U.S., looking at their prevalence, persistence, and the impact of wastewater treatment technologies on reducing and unfortunately sometimes increasing antibiotic resistance in wastewater, which then can enter the environment and our food system.
Miller: How far were you able to progress in this work before you got your notification that you had to stop?
Navab-Daneshmand: So as you mentioned, we talked back in September. We were awarded the grant September 1. And eight months in, May 7, was when I received the termination email, effective immediately.
Miller: So about two months ago. How much work were you able to do over the course of less than a year?
Navab-Daneshmand: So fortunately for us, our group were able to recruit the grad students and some of the postdocs on the project, and we started. We were supposed to do a four seasons sampling campaign. We were able to collect wastewater samples from 40 wastewater utilities across the country in winter. And then in anticipation for potential tariffs and prices going up, we ordered a lot of lab material and supply to process those samples. But then the grant was terminated.
So we have some samples we can process if we are able to identify sources of funding to support our grad students. But it’s just a portion of the data that will not have meaningful conclusions as we’d hoped for to contribute to the knowledge and help answer the questions we have.
Miller: What reasons were you given for the termination of your grant?
Navab-Daneshmand: So in our termination notice, we were told that the project is terminated in its entirety on the grounds that the award no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities. However, program goals and agency priorities of the EPA, from what the information they have on their website, have not changed. So we are not sure what the new priorities are, and how our project and research does not meet their priorities.
Miller: Do you have a theory, or are you completely in the dark? At least with Lauren Forrest, they were mistaken in the way they characterized her research, but we can very clearly see a political ideology at work. Is it the same for you?
Navab-Daneshmand: No. Our project didn’t focus or prioritize any populations based on any basis, protected status, race or anything. It actually was focused on public health and it aligns with the priorities of the president’s Make America Healthy Commission.
Miller: To reduce the use, say, of antibiotics or to address antibiotic resistant bacteria.
Navab-Daneshmand: Yes.
Miller: Marguerita, can you tell us about the study that you were doing?
Lightfoot: Yeah, so we were looking at guaranteed income programs. We wanted to determine the impact of guaranteed income on the physical, emotional and financial well-being of Black, low-income, young people, emerging adults. So we were conducting the first rigorously-designed, randomized controlled trial of guaranteed income, with the goal of informing the numerous guaranteed income programs that are being implemented across the country, including here in Oregon.
Miller: In other words, these kinds of efforts are being tried out in various ways all across the country, and you wanted to see if they’re successful, what makes them successful and who they’re successful for?
Lightfoot: Exactly, for what, when and under what conditions can these programs help, in particular young people.
Miller: How far along were you?
Lightfoot: We were in year four of a five year grant. We were about three months from completing our data collection.
Miller: Do you have meaningful data that you can salvage? Or is the lack of completion of that initial time period catastrophic?
Lightfoot: So we can say something about what happened after a year of young people being in our project. Interestingly enough, like five hours after we had submitted an abstract to the American Public Health Association talking about some of our outcomes on mental health is when we received our letter of termination. But without funding to support the folks doing the analysis for us being able to collect the last bits of data, we won’t be able to say anything about the long-term impacts of guaranteed income, or the short-term impacts on other outcomes that were about investments in the future and some secondary kinds of outcomes.
Miller: My understanding is that the administration has argued that studies like yours are unscientific. If you could actually make your case directly to somebody in the administration who would listen to you in good faith, what would you say?
Lightfoot: Our project is looking at an intervention that can benefit people across America. Right now, there are pilot projects that are being supported by mayors for guaranteed income, counties for guaranteed income, states that are implementing programs. They have some data, but they’re not doing it with long-term information and data to help them make decisions about when should they be giving a guaranteed income, how much should they be giving, to who will benefit the most and during what period of time.
So, for example, we are doing our program during emerging adulthood, where it’s this transition where young people 18 to 24 are transitioning to adulthood, where GI could provide the support needed to really develop healthy educational and employment trajectories before deepening disparities begin to exist. But we won’t be able to tell anyone about that because we won’t be able to finish the data collection or analyze enough of our data to be able to tell that story.
Miller: What about the specific point that the administration is making, that it’s inappropriate to focus on inequities in the first place?
Lightfoot: One, health equities is actually written into the NIH strategic plan. So even though our notice talked about no longer effectuating agency priorities, they have not provided any other additional guidance outside of what’s already part of the strategic plan.
And similar to what my colleague was talking about earlier, if we want to have an impact on the health of all Americans, we need to be able to address when disparities exist, understand why some folks are getting a disease or having poorer health outcomes than other folks. Because when folks get disease, when folks get sick, it’s a drain on the systems. It’s a drain on our hospital and our health care system. So it’s in the best interest of all of us to address those issues early and quickly, and even prevent them when we can. But we can’t do that unless we do the research to understand why those differences exist in the first place.
Miller: Lauren Forrest, to go back to you, what do you think the cancellation of your grant and hundreds of millions of dollars of grants that had been focused on other vulnerable populations in other ways – what do you think it’s going to mean for all of us?
Forrest: I mean, it’s not going to be good. I am totally convinced that more people are going to be distressed, more people are going to be hurting and more people are going to harm themselves – and that hurts everyone. When one person dies by suicide, that has ripple effects on so many people in their lives. And it’s incredibly painful for the person struggling, it’s incredibly painful for their friends, their family members, their neighbors, their colleagues. This is not going to be good.
And I would argue that not studying vulnerable populations hurts all of us because suicide is a low base rate outcome, which in non-psychobabble means that it doesn’t happen super, super often. So we can learn a lot about suicide by studying groups of people who have high rates of that low base rate outcome.
So in my mind, it doesn’t matter that I’m studying suicide and LGBTQ people. I’m learning about things that are going to be relevant to anyone regardless of their sexual orientation, regardless of their race, their ethnicity, their income status. It is hard to understand what causes people to think about suicide, attempt suicide or die by suicide. So to me, it doesn’t matter what population. It it shouldn’t matter that I’m studying suicide in one specific population. I’m learning things that are relevant to that specific population, but I’m also learning things that are relevant to all of us.
By depriving us of this knowledge about suicide in rural lesbian, gay and bisexual people in my study specifically, we’re also robbing ourselves of knowledge that might contribute to suicide prevention for literally anyone, whether that’s your kid, your neighbor, your friend, your parent, etc.
Miller: Marguerita, what has all this meant for the future of science and scientists in our country?
Lightfoot: It’s been devastating. For someone like me, I’m a full professor, so I’ve had an academic career for a while. I can weather, or I’m better positioned to weather this storm. But for our younger faculty members who are just starting out in their career, this is gonna be incredibly devastating. Figuring out how to maintain and accelerate their academic trajectory and their research portfolios in this current environment is gonna be incredibly difficult, let alone just the psychological harm that’s happening for folks who are having to deal with this.
I’m also really worried about losing the next generation of scientists. I had a postdoc on my study that we had to let go. And I’m hearing from students, from trainees, about why should they do research? It seems too hard to be able to do research. So we’re seeing some of our early career folks who are moving on from research. And we’re going to be losing the opportunity to have those new ideas and those new innovations to address some of our most salient problems.
Miller: Tala, have you wondered if you want to keep doing research in the U.S.?
Navab-Daneshmand: I have wondered. But I do want to continue working and doing research in the U.S. because I want to contribute to the advancement of knowledge to help protect public health. And I want to train the next generation of engineers and scientists to continue doing this. So it’s hard. But yes, I want to continue.
Miller: Tala, Lauren and Marguerita, thanks very much.
All: Thank you.
Miller: Tala Navab-Daneshmand is an associate professor of environmental engineering at Oregon State University. Lauren Forrest is an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Oregon. Marguerita Lightfoot is a professor at the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health.
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