Documenting the Trump administration assault on public health research

A new study from #DefendResearch and Research Consulting – From anecdote to evidence – aims to generate a “citable evidence base” demonstrating how the second Trump administration has interfered with public health research in the USA since taking power in January 2025.

Based on an analysis of 244 scholarly and news sources, it details and categorises what happens when “political authority intervenes in the processes through which scientific evidence is produced,” such as funding, data collection, editorial decision-making, and the maintenance of public records. The conclusions are stark:

“Records were altered, data collection was reduced, institutional capacity was weakened, expertise was removed from decision-making, and funding was used to exert pressure. Researchers also began anticipating possible sanctions and adjusting their behavior.”

At the National Institutes of Health, almost 6,000 grants were disrupted in some form, worth nearly $15bn. As the report explains, however, while disruption in itself damages scientific research – many grants were later restored after challenge – there are also more pernicious effects on the system.

At the national level, the report spotlights three different categories of interference. First is “tampering” with the public record, such as when vaccine information statements were removed from the Centers for Disease Control website, or when research datasets were altered, in many cases without revisions being explained. There are also examples of important surveys being discontinued, including in maternal health, food security, and foodborne illness, and then simply the “elimination” of federal scientific machinery: job cuts, programme mergers, and the curtailment of advisory boards, such as the dismissal of all 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

The report also looks at changes at the level of national institutions – which may “look unchanged from outside” in some cases, but within which power is shifting to political rather than scientific actors – as well as at researcher-level. There are said to have been a “smaller number” of cases of staff who were fired or disciplined after raising objections – the more common situation has been “policing” of what researchers can say or investigate, as well as plenty of evidence of organisations pre-emptively altering their programmes.

In response

The second half of the study explores the varying ways in which actors in the research system have sought to challenge the Trump administration’s interventions. These are divided into three categories – reversal, replacement, and refusal – with examples identified for each.

Groups seeking to reverse funding cuts or termination of grants is described as the “best-documented” form of response, as it leaves a visible trail (the authors also note that reversed decisions were not distributed evenly, as Republican states in many cases did not challenge grant terminations in court, for example). Refusal to comply, on the other hand, is the “thinnest” of the resistance strategies in the dataset the report has used.

These responses are characterised as “recovered assets without restoring control”:

“Each of the three defense strategies discussed above addressed a specific harm. None is designed to change the underlying concentration of executive control over federal data, grants and agencies, and none has done so.”

The report concludes with a sketch of what a more resilient research system would look like, in terms of taking steps to remove dependencies on executive decision-making from vital areas such as data, funding, and the health of institutions as a whole.

The recommended actions include legislating for statutory public access to federal data, having media plans prepared in advance, and creating shared legal and financial resources so that “an institution’s ability to refuse political demands does not depend on how much it can afford to lose.”