Ideological Crusade Against DEI Will Yield Dire Consequences for Medical Research
“The tenets of DEI demand that you discriminate against white people by giving preferential treatment to other races,” said right-wing activist Robby Starbuck on Jordan Peterson’s podcast on February 2nd, 2025 (Jordan B. Peterson, 2025)
This conspiracy theory is the underlying sentiment being used by the current Trump Administration to justify its targeted actions against people of color, women and gender-nonconforming people, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) people in the United States. Unfortunately, it will yield dire consequences for medical research…and undercut efforts to achieve health equity!
How these actions have played out across the federal government’s various agencies and throughout the medical and scientific research spaces has been both stark and shocking:
An analysis conducted by the chairs of dozens of boards at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in March found that, of the 43 experts whose review board positions were eliminated without notice or reasons—scientists with expertise in the fields of mental health, cancer, and infectious disease—38 were female, Black, or Hispanic:
According to the analysis, six percent of White males who serve on boards were fired, compared with half of Black and Hispanic females and a quarter of all females. Of 36 Black and Hispanic board members, close to 40 percent were fired, compared with 16 percent of White board members. The analysis calculated the likelihood that this would have happened by chance as 1 in 300 (Johnson, 2025).
National Institutes of Health
Board members generally serve terms lasting five years; several members’ terms had just begun in the past year.
Beyond the firing of non-White males serving in the NIH, funding has also been stripped from dozens of NIH-funded research efforts, including those studying Black maternal and fetal health, as well as cancer and HIV. These efforts, according to the termination letters received by the researchers, 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” (Hellmann, 2025).
“At HHS, we are dedicated to restoring our agencies to their tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science. As we begin to Make America Healthy Again, it’s important to prioritize research that directly affects the health of Americans,” said U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) spokesman, Andrew Nixon. “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” (Hellmann, 2025).
Similar to the justification for terminating non-White male employees, the underlying sentiment of this statement implies that any research efforts that seek to identify the root causes of why chronic diseases disproportionately impact minority populations are scientifically invalid, and that we should instead be generalizing research rather than investigating how to help those who bear the greatest impacts.
This is the “new normal” in the United States, and the impacts that the conspiracy-laden politics of revenge and white grievance will have on scientific research could potentially take a generation to correct and repair. Many of the scientists, themselves, have chosen to abandon the United States, quickly sliding into dysfunction, for safer pastures:
Since the current administration began occupying The White House, universities in European nations have been opening their doors to scientists fleeing ‘censorship” and “political interference” (Kassahm, 2025a). So far, opportunities for relocation have been posted in Belgium, Canada, France, and the Netherlands (Duster, 2025), with other countries in active discussions on how to capitalize on the desires of U.S. scientists to leave the country.
…and these countries will have thousands of takers. According to a survey conducted the scientific journal, Nature, of the 1,608 scientists who responded to their poll question asking, “Are you a U.S. researcher who is considering leaving the country following the disruptions to science prompted by the Trump administration,” 75.3% (n=1,211) responded that they were considering doing so (Witze, 2025).
Aix-Marseille University set up a program called “Safe Place for Science” (Mokhtarthu, 2025), which created 20 positions for fleeing scientists:
At a time when academic freedom is sometimes called into question, Aix-Marseille University is launching the Safe Place For Science program, providing a safe and stimulating environment for scientists wishing to pursue their research freely (Mokhtarthu, 2025).
This program received 298 applications in a month, of which 242 were deemed eligible, and included applicants from Johns Hopkins University, NASA, Columbia, Yale, and Stanford (Kassam, 2025b).
An article also published in Nature clearly defines what is occurring in the United States.:
Many countries have tried to emulate this model of science-led growth, and to stop the ‘brain drain’ of talent to better-resourced laboratories in the United States. Now, the actions of the administration run the risk of slowing, if not halting, that trend, as the country seeks to devalue scientific evidence in policymaking and attack the structures supporting the domestic knowledge ecosystem, including universities, libraries, and museums (Nature, 2025).
This type of exodus from scientific minds and expertise is called a “brain drain,” a term coined after World War II to describe the emigration of scientists and technologists to North America from post-World War II Europe. We are now seeing this again…but in reverse. The United States has long served as a safe haven for scientists and experts escaping political influence and authoritarian regimes across the planet; we are now the country to which they are fleeing.
Missing from many of these discussions is the very real concern of what this means for any data publications released during the current administration:
The current administration has made no efforts to hide that they will be actively directing and controlling the release of information from federal agencies and departments:
One of the first official actions under this administration was to immediately pause all external communications from health agencies, including social media posts, scientific reports, website updates, and Federal Register notices (Association for the Advancement of Blood & Biotherapies, 2025). This pause ordered all documents and communications to be reviewed by a presidential appointee before issuing, directed federal employees not to speak at any public speaking engagements, and required coordination with political appointees before corresponding with Congress or state governors.
Further evidence comes from Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has ordered the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the NIH to disregard decades of scientific studies and findings in order to find the “environmental factors” that are “causing” the “autism epidemic” (Wadman, 2025).
Both incidents, along with a litany of other incidents of overt attempts by this administration to not only control the flow of information but to force research to be rewritten to comply with a conspiracy-driven ideology, raise troubling questions that have yet to be fully confronted:
Can anything put forth by the Trump Administration be considered trustworthy?
How can any data released during these troubling times be considered valid when this administration has made clear that only data that agrees with their worldview is acceptable?
For example, the CDC releases its annual HIV Surveillance Report, and its current year’s findings vastly differ from those of previous years.
What if demographic data are missing? What if states whose governments align with the regime receive glowing reports, while those that don’t receive black marks? After scientists have drafted their findings, how can we guarantee that the data has not been tampered with and altered to support the regime’s positions?
More importantly, how vast will the devastation be to our institutions and to public trust in them, particularly at a time when the regime has spent nearly a decade sowing conspiracy theories and disinformation against them?
We need to grapple with these questions and consider their implications for the future of equity research and our nation.