When Dr. Steven Kahn, a distinguished physician specializing in diabetes, published a co-authored editorial in April in the journal Diabetes Care criticizing the Trump administration’s proposal to cut the National Institutes of Health’s funding by $5 billion, he had no way of knowing that the article would result in his forcible ejection from the American Diabetes Association’s annual Scientific Sessions just two months later. Well-placed sources tell us that the removal was ordered by the ADA’s own top officials, likely fearful of offending the administration. The ADA’s CEO, Charles Henderson, later apologized. It’s another case of a large institution making a futile effort to appease the Trump White House at the expense of its own principles.
Dr. Kahn’s sin was his effort to distribute copies of his editorial, in a flagship journal published by the same ADA. In a video published on MedPage Today, Kahn, with colleagues Drs. Justin Ryder and Aaron Kelly, is seen handing out packets of paper when they are confronted and hustled out by a motley crew of security personnel, local law enforcement, and ADA leadership. Kahn’s papers are aggressively yanked away by a facility security guard.
It’s another case of a large institution making a futile effort to appease the Trump White House at the expense of its own principles.
National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya had been scheduled to give the keynote speech before canceling at the last minute. But by attempting to censor their members and kowtowing to the administration, the ADA put a national spotlight on an editorial that would have otherwise barely made a blip.
The editorial, published in Diabetes Care by Kahn, Cheryl A.M. Anderson, John B. Buse, and Elizabeth Selvin, criticizes the Trump administration budget proposal to cut NIH funding by $5 billion, a threat still posed at the time of its late-April publishing date. The proposal states that the NIH “broke the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health,” mostly citing DEI initiatives. While that funding cut has been rejected by the House Appropriations Committee, the effect of slow-walking spending and consequently freezing grants has been a serious disruption to American scientific research.
The result is a more than 50 percent cut in the value of competitive awards doled out by the NIH since the Biden administration. Time is a structural necessity for scientific study and research. Delays in appropriations, exacerbated by DOGE cuts to NIH staff, undermine long-term studies, which are sometimes forced to pause or lay off researchers while awaiting approval or confirmation of continued funding. As the editorial points out, in the second Trump administration, there have only been 84 Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs)—announcements of grant money—compared to 787 the year before.
Although the NIH funding was eventually reinstated after months, damage was already done, Dr. Buse, a co-author of the editorial and a distinguished professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told the Prospect. “That causes a big disruption in the way that research labs and clinical trials can proceed,” Buse said. “Many sites in which the participants in the trials were enrolled lost opportunities for collecting data, and people who were very worried about their employment, who left.”
About a month later, in late May, the Office of Management and Budget proposed a set of rule changes to the grant award disbursement process. According to the proposal, the changes are meant to ensure that “activities performed under Federal awards are consistent with law and policy.” But Alexa S. Dietrich, the research director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, sees the change as just another maneuver by Trump’s DEI censorship regime to politicize grantmaking and has called on scientists and academics to join her in sounding the alarm.
“I think [the incident at the ADA’s Scientific Sessions] has only proven to [other scientists] that the concerns raised by the OMB rule are real,” Dietrich told the Prospect, adding that the rule “has really galvanized the scientific community in ways that [are] maybe the biggest push we’ve seen.”
Among the dozens of amendments, the rule would require grants to align with the president’s policy priorities, give more oversight to nonscientist political appointees, de-emphasize peer review, and provide federal agencies with more leeway to suddenly terminate or suspend active grants, if the agency determines that a suspension is in its “interest,” without providing “a detailed or exhaustive analysis.” The proposal has garnered over 30,000 comments from the public at the time of publication.
“From their perspective, anyone who has done DEI research or continues to do it is almost doing something illegal,” Dietrich said.
As scientists are forced to contend with funding cuts in response to measures using language related to DEI, a review of what diversity, equity, and inclusion actually means in the scientific context is worthwhile. While scientists may discover new approaches to combating or treating a disease, effectively spreading the word to affected communities is an entirely separate fight—“the last mile of what we call translation,” as Buse says—which is where most DEI-related grants come in.
“At the end of the day, a great majority of poor health in America is really from a lack of effective implementation of what we know, what we have proven is effective to improve outcomes,” Buse said. “And a big problem there are issues like poverty, social barriers, things like that, and there are specific grant programs that have focused on how to overcome those barriers.”
One example of such DEI funding is the Special Diabetes Program for Indians (SDPI), which now faces a 75 percent reduction in funding if Congress fails to act before its authorization expires on December 31, only because the end of its five-year cycle falls under President Trump’s anti-DEI reign. Established in 1997, the program seeks to counteract the disproportionate rate of American Indians affected by diabetes, “funding prevention, treatment and education initiatives,” setting benchmarks to reduce diabetes rates in American Indian communities in 35 states year over year. According to the National Indian Health Board, the nearly three decades of the SDPI have seen a 54 percent reduction in end-stage renal disease and an 84 percent reduction in hospitalizations for uncontrolled diabetes.
In the aftermath of the ADA fiasco in New Orleans, the fight roils on. In a letter addressed to NIH Director Bhattacharya last month, Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee demanded the rescission of the rule and warned it was “threatening to undermine science as we know it by replacing science with politics.”
Charles Henderson, the CEO of the ADA, has since issued a video statement, apologizing to the authors and those removed from the convention. “The ADA will continue to advocate for robust NIH funding, support the pursuit of scientific discovery, and advocate for the broader research community,” Henderson says in the video.
But for Dr. Kahn, getting manhandled and thrown out of his own organization’s conference has only redoubled his resolve, and he does not feel that the ADA has taken a sufficiently firm stance. “If these other editors and other associations are gonna play like the ADA, and how they do now, the country is just going to continue to roll to destroy research. There needs to be an outcry,” Kahn said. “Congress, and a lot of people there, are just, by being scared, are really just destroying the country. And this all has to stop.”
