Two incoming lawmakers plan to defend health equity from Trump administration cuts

Amid a sweep of Democratic victories in Tuesday’s midterms, some online commentators jokingly declared “Woke is back.” There was little congressional pushback over the past two years as the Trump administration terminated hundreds of grants meant to chronicle and remedy medical inequities, shuttered programs intended to diversify the science workforce, and opened investigations into universities and medical schools it accused of discriminating against white and Asian applicants. Will that change now that the Democratic Party has won control of the 120th Congress? Two newly elected candidates with science credentials told STAT they hope to change that: Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former health disparities researcher, and incoming Rep. Jasmine Clark of Georgia, a microbiologist who will be the first Black woman with a STEM Ph.D. Democrats have a long list of priorities, and with President Trump still wielding his veto power, passing bills related to health equity will still be an uphill battle. The White House posted on X Thursday, “FYI: DEI is still dead.” But, the introduction of at least two lawmakers with personal connections to health equity work could offer a counterweight to such policies for the rest of the second Trump administration. “I know firsthand what DEI initiatives can do for students who are trying to find their way, and they don’t actually quite know all of the options that are available to them,” Clark told STAT in an interview Wednesday. A former professor, she said such programs have opened up opportunities for her students in the sciences. El-Sayed, interviewed a few days before the election, said, “The war on diversity, equity, and inclusion is about a vision of an America that doesn’t include certain kinds of people. I will always stand for an America where everybody is included and empowered, and I think that’s critical for us as we move to the future.” During his time in academia, he did research on disparities in maternal health and within the Arab American community. He added, “we need to be able to document the ways in which our systems are allowing for and, in some respects, creating the differences in the ability for people to live long, healthy lives. It’s important work, and it should help guide where public policy gaps are and where we need to fill them.” The second Trump administration has seen unprecedented changes to the scientific ecosystem. Some of the most major have drawn forceful responses from Congress. Proposals to cut the National Institutes of Health’s budget, cap funding for overhead costs at universities, and exert more political control over federal funding have all been rebuked by Congress. With the Democrats taking control of both chambers, further pushback may be coming. The NIH did not respond to a request for comment. A number of physicians and scientists who won their races have noted that accountability for health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is high on their list of priorities. Part of that accountability should be understanding which communities and researchers were affected by policies like grant terminations over the past two years, said Jennifer Jones, who directs the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “I want to know who was most harmed by this because there’s absolutely a justice and equity issue at play when you clearly attack issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion,” she said. While equity work is sometimes portrayed as controversial, Philip Alberti, the founding director of the Association of American Medical Colleges Center for Health Justice, said polling he has done has shown broad support for health equity initiatives across ideological groups. “Three-quarters of U.S. adults support the goal of ‘all communities having a fair and just opportunity to be healthy,’ and 65% of adults who have ever heard the term ‘health equity’ support it, too,” he said. “This was true across all subgroups, including across groups defined by self-identified ideology. This is not controversial.” Clark trained as a microbiologist before taking to politics during the first Trump administration. She said she would seek an assignment on the House oversight committee and has a number of questions she’d like to pose to appointees like Kennedy. For one, she would like to understand why the administration has repeatedly pushed for a controversial hepatitis B vaccine study in Guinea-Bissau. Clark likened that trial to the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, an unethical study conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that withheld treatment for syphilis from nearly 400 African American men from 1932 to 1972. Another way she has seen the fallout of the administration is that her former lab, which studies HIV transmission, had to pause some of its longitudinal studies in Africa because of restrictions on international collaborations. Even if the lab is able to find more funding, “you basically have to start from scratch, or you just have a big hole in your data. That’s not what we need to be doing if we want to actually do things like end the HIV epidemic,” she said. She also lamented the process of grants for federal funding being screened for certain terms and phrases to determine if they are related to “DEI.” This process has particularly affected researchers studying health disparities, and has made it difficult for some to apply for new funding. In September, a handful of researchers sued the agency, arguing this process infringed on their first amendment rights. “Having the ability to write in your research grant that you’re looking at the disproportionate impact without having to dance around those words because any grant that has the word ‘disproportionate,’ or ‘woman,’ or ‘Black,’ or ‘gender,’ or anything like that all of a sudden gets flagged,” she said. “That’s not the environment we should be operating under if we actually want to answer real-life questions. So I look forward to being a part of a Congress that will prioritize moving toward and not immediately dismissing research because they are trying to answer questions about why one group is impacted more than another.”