My student's funding just got axed

How the administration's attacks on science are hurting trainees

A disappointing but not surprising email landed in my inbox last week. The training grant that was supporting my doctoral student Gabriel (Gabe) León’s graduate work had been abruptly cancelled by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The two of us had worked hard on preparing Gabe’s application for this grant just a few years ago, and were thrilled when he received the prestigious award. It covered two years of his research and living expenses. Compared to the big multimillion dollar research grants that NIH gives out, this was a modest award, just enough to support Gabe with a small stipend for a couple of years. But the grant cancellation was still a setback, because Gabe was counting on the funds.

Gabe and I (on the left) with our lab group at a paper writing retreat in 2023

Why did the funding get axed so suddenly? Not because of any problem with Gabe’s academic progress – he’s an excellent student – or his research, which focuses on mental health in new parents. He was doing everything right: publishing original research, conducting clinical work with families, and mentoring undergraduates in our lab.

No, the grant got pulled because the mechanism that was supporting him, what NIH calls a Diversity Supplement, was created to support the training of individuals who are from groups that are historically underrepresented in biomedical science. Even though NIH designed this mechanism and has encouraged students to apply for it, it is now terminating projects funded under this umbrella – often halfway through students’ training.

The most galling part of the whole experience was the message from NIH that came along with Gabe’s cancellation. It added insult to injury. Along with the notice of termination, the note said:

Research programs based primarily on artificial and non-scientific categories, including amorphous equity objectives, 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.

It's not clear what “amorphous equity objectives” means, but it’s frustrating to be told your work is “antithetical to the scientific inquiry” while your livelihood is being yanked away from you. Although this statement is hard to parse (both Gabe and I suspected the grant cancellation email was AI-generated), it seems to be saying that diversity objectives, or attempts to achieve equal opportunity in science training, are “non-scientific” and bad.

In a field like ours (clinical psychology) this claim is dead wrong. When you study humans, of course you should care about how people are different from each other. Our work focuses on parents and children. As Tolstoy wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Understanding sources of difference – culture, ethnicity, socioeconomic resources, local context – tells us how to intervene better when families are struggling.

As clinical psychologists, we seek to understand and effectively treat mental health problems. Gabe’s work has focused on how parents and children influence each other’s wellbeing, how babies learn to regulate their emotions in accord with their parents, how hormones and emotional states become linked within couples and families, and how social connection affects mental health in new parents. Insights from this research can shape how we approach the postpartum period and help families that need support.

Treating a diversity of families means that we also want a diversity of investigators who can bring their own lived experiences and insights to their work. For too long, clinical psychologists have been whiter and wealthier than the general population, and they frequently deploy therapy approaches developed and tested only within white, wealthy study samples. That’s a limitation. In our Los Angeles based doctoral training program, the majority of therapy clients we serve are neither white nor wealthy. In order to better understand the problems they face and the kinds of interventions that will serve them best, we must widen our aperture.

The NIH created the Diversity Supplement to fulfill this goal: to broaden the population of future scientists with the hope of generating new insights and fostering greater talent. Contrary to assumptions that “DEI” in science is some recent, uber-woke invention, our science agencies formalized diversity goals decades ago, with a bipartisan mandate. The Science and Engineering Equal Opportunities Act, which passed in 1980 with both Republican and Democratic support, had an explicit goal of making the United States more competitive by increasing the participation of underrepresented groups (women and minorities) who had been formerly shut out of science careers. More talent is a good thing when you want to compete globally.

Before funding agencies enshrined equal opportunity mandates, universities and scientific institutions practiced a form of reverse-DEI identity politics, promoting white males at the expense of talented researchers who did not fit a narrow mode. For decades, elite universities were closed to women, and maintained quotas to ensure that Jewish, Asian, and international students did not outnumber WASPy white prep school grads. (Indeed, as

Musa al-Gharbi

points out in a recent post, universities still practice DEI that favors males and conservatives, not to mention legacies). We don’t know how many discoveries we missed because of brilliant trainees who were shut out of science.

NIH uses a broad definition of diversity. It includes veterans, individuals from rural areas, low-income folks, first-generation college graduates, and those from racial and ethnic groups that are not well represented. (J.D. Vance, a low-income, first-generation white person from rural Ohio, would be eligible for a diversity award from NIH. So would many Trump voters). To qualify for the type of grant that Gabe received, students still have to get admitted to a graduate program. Our clinical psychology program gets over 700 applications a cycle and accepts about 1% of them, all of whom have near-perfect GPAs and extensive research records. Students must have mentoring relationships already established, and the mentors themselves must already have successfully competed for funding, because the Diversity Supplement is designed to be an add-on to an existing, larger grant. The National Institutes of Child and Human Development (NICHD), the institute that funds my lab, has a payline of less than 10% for the type of grant I received, meaning that 90% of proposals go unfunded. In other words, there is no lack of rigorous gatekeeping surrounding awards like Gabe’s.

The Diversity Supplement was working as intended in Gabe’s case. It was protecting his time so he could conduct and disseminate research that benefits families. The NIH’s small investment in his training was poised to pay dividends as he prepared to contribute to the field in the decades to come. Gabe was born and raised in Southern New Mexico – a state with the third highest poverty rate in the U.S. and the bottom 15% for educational attainment. His dream is to someday return to New Mexico to serve his community as a clinical scientist, educator, and mentor for a new generation of scholars. Now, Gabe is understandably demoralized by a research environment that seems to have suddenly turned on him, so much so that it’s calling his source of support “antithetical to the scientific inquiry.” Multiply his small experience thousands of times, and you’ll start to see why scientists are abandoning their careers or opting to train outside of the United States.

The 2026 budget contains dramatic cuts to our science and research agencies that will hurt our progress across the board, but the people hurt most are students and trainees. If the budget passes, the National Science Foundation will support less than a third of the graduate students it does now, and just 18% of the postdocs. Even undergraduate research programs have been cut.

The impact of these chaotic cancellations will reverberate for generations, because we are disproportionately hurting the youngest generation of scientists. That means not just a loss of potential knowledge right now, but a loss of our future as a nation that competes on the global stage as a center of innovation and discovery.