'I refuse to give up': Michigan researchers, health officials grapple with funding cuts

USA Today

08-06-2025

'I refuse to give up': Michigan researchers, health officials grapple with funding cuts
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Video: MSU breast cancer researcher Jamie Bernard talks about funding uncertainty
MSU breast cancer researcher Jamie Bernard talks about federal funding uncertainty on Thursday, May 8, 2025, at her lab in East Lansing.
Michigan public health officers say they've had to cut services and lay off workers after the Trump administration slashed funding, affecting their ability to work to stop the spread of disease.
Scientists from the University of Michigan and Michigan State University say federal cuts to their research could halt development for new cancer treatments and eviscerate the scientific workforce.
Using words like "devastating," "heartbreaking," and "shortsighted," Michigan public health leaders and researchers at the state's largest universities described the effects of President Donald Trump's efforts to slash federal government spending — through executive orders, cuts to federal grants, and stop work orders — and the wide-reaching fallout.
Some local health departments have laid off workers and cut back on the services they can provide at regional laboratories and at community and in-school health clinics, and have seen disruptions in their ability to stop the spread of infectious disease, said Norm Hess, executive director of the Michigan Association for Local Public Health.
When the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services revoked $11.4 billion in COVID-19-related grants in late March, the effects were felt across Michigan in ways that might not have been anticipated, he said.
'While everyone agrees the emergency response phase of COVID-19 is over, the funding streams created for pandemic response have been supporting laboratories monitoring other diseases around the state, from legionella to tuberculosis to measles, as well as water quality inspections and other sampling work,' Hess said.
'Federal leaders rescinded those grants, clearly thinking it was a responsible way to recover money that was being misspent. Instead, it's a great example of unintended consequences. Everyone agrees government should spend public dollars efficiently and effectively, but it appears they did not check to see what they were actually eliminating when cutting grants that had 'COVID' on the label.'
Although Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has joined other states in challenging many of the Trump administration's cuts to federal public health and university research funding, including the $11.4 billion in COVID-19-related grants, Hess said it's too risky for local health departments to count on money that may or may not be awarded to them in the end.
"You can't turn it off, and then if money comes, turn it back on," he said.
Cuts hit research on the science of aging
When he took office, Trump pledged to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in federal spending, and "make America healthy again" by shifting priorities of the nation's top health agencies and taking aim at research and programs that focused on diversity, equity and inclusion.
But medical researchers at Michigan State University and the University of Michigan say his administration's abrupt cuts to funding for scientific studies, clinical trials and training programs have all but gutted their life's work and could halt the development of new treatments for diseases like cancer as well as eviscerate the future scientific workforce.
University of Michigan psychology professor Toni Antonucci lost the $13 million federal grant that supported her research on health disparities among aging Americans. It focused on minority populations, including African Americans, and comes at a moment in history when the U.S. population is older than it ever has been and is growing increasingly diverse.
"I have never thought that politics should be involved in research, and, unfortunately, this is clearly the case here," said Antonucci, who has worked at U-M since the 1970s. "We were focusing on our most vulnerable populations, and I think that's the reason that the money was ... rescinded.
"It shows a kind of shortsightedness and, in a way, vindictiveness. ... My focus was on ... how can the social relations that people have improve their health? What kinds of relationships are positive for people or negative for people? How do we increase the positive, and reduce the negative?
"What are the kinds of things that universally predict better health, longer longevity? ... The point is, if you know what's influencing different groups, it gives you some insight on how to intervene both with that group and with other groups."
Now, she said, that data will be lost.
"If a government has policies that they want to enact, regardless of the data, then this is what you do," Antonucci said. "You just make sure there are no data. But just because you don't collect the data, that doesn't mean the association isn't still there."
U-M professor: Slashed grants suggest 'you just don't matter'
Gary Harper, a U-M professor of health behavior and health equity, learned in late March that his nearly $1.15 million five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health had been rescinded.
"It's devastating," said Harper. "I am an openly gay man, and have been involved in activism, research, clinical work, and policy work in the HIV field for 40 years, starting out in 1985 as an old-time activist at a time when we were burying our friends every week. ... This is the first time in the history of my academic career that I've been without federal research or training funds."
Harper is co-director of the SOAR at U-M, which stands for Student Opportunities for AIDS/HIV Research. It's a two-year intensive mentoring program that provides HIV-related research opportunities to undergraduate students, propelling them toward graduate school, and, eventually, the HIV research workforce.
Many of those students are LGBTQ+ themselves, have disabilities, or come from low-income backgrounds, he said, but Harper noted that the program is open to anyone.
"I'm a strong believer that we need to be making sure that we mentor researchers who reflect the communities that are most impacted," Harper said.
More: Federal research cuts would rock Michigan economy, halt clinical trials, those affected say
More: Trump's budget cuts could cost Michigan universities more than $200 million
Discovering that the NIH canceled SOAR's grant funding "ripped me apart," Harper said. "We have one more cohort to get through their senior year."
He said he won't let the Trump administration win and cancel the program before they graduate.
"Basically, what they're saying is, 'We don't want to spend any money on you because you just don't matter,' " Harper said. " 'Your life has no value.' ... Well, I refuse to give up on them."
Harper and SOAR's co-director are scrambling together the money themselves to pay for the final year of the program.
Slowly, he said, that is coming together, but his other work through the Adolescent Medicine Trials Network (ATN) for HIV/AIDS Intervention has also been targeted by the federal cuts. A study on transgender youths was canceled, he said, and funding for the leadership group that oversees equity and inclusion in all ATN studies also was eliminated. He also lost grant funding to study gay and bisexual men in Kenya living with HIV.
Still, he said, "I'm not going to let this get me down.
"I try and show power and strength and resilience to the students, to give them hope that this, too, shall pass. This is a moment in time, but this is not your entire life. ... Your lives do matter. You are special and you are perfect, just the way you are."
Breast cancer prevention studies in limbo
The Trump administration isn't taking aim solely at research that fits its definition of DEI, said Jamie Bernard, an associate professor of pharmacology and toxicology at Michigan State University.
"What I don't really think is being well communicated is that cancer research is also being threatened," said Bernard, who began studying interventions to prevent breast cancer in 2016, when her mother, Pamela O'Brien, was diagnosed with the disease at 61 years old.
"This is something that Democrats and Republicans have always supported. In fact, we've come so far in the treatment of breast cancer due to federal funding, we diagnose women earlier. There's lots of options for treatment, and really, this research has saved a lot of lives and brought health care costs down."
Her work is now focused on the environmental and lifestyle factors that can increase a woman's risk of getting aggressive breast cancers.
"Not all breast cancers are curable, so that's what I really set off to focus on," she said, explaining that her work involves understanding how to kill cancer cells that are resistant to treatment and discovering new drug therapies.
Earlier this year, she applied to renew a $2.07 million federal grant funded by the National Institutes of Health along with a new, $2.79 million grant, but both have been held up for months in a cloud of uncertainty.
The initial reviews of her grants were postponed but eventually got through the first stage of the process; they now await the second step of review. There remain no guarantees.
"How are they going to choose what they fund?" she said. "I don't know what's going to happen, really. So, we are in a time of uncertainty. Grant funding has always been uncertain. It's always been competitive, but there's always been a process and an infrastructure that researchers have relied on."
Bernard runs a research lab at MSU, where a team of scientists are working to 'stop breast cancer from ever starting in the first place or prevent it so much that you've delayed it and you die of some other natural cause before you have to deal with cancer," she said.
"I am in a place where I don't know if I should be accepting students in the fall. What's my next move? Am I still allowed to study what I've been studying? So it's a confusing time, a frustrating time, a time of high anxiety in our department of pharmacology and toxicology.'
Bernard said the NIH canceled a grant for a graduate student from Puerto Rico who is Hispanic, and had applied through a mechanism that provided funding for predoctoral students who are disabled, identify as Black, Hispanic, American Indian or Alaska Native, or who are from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds.
"Just simply because she was a minority, the grant mechanism that she applied with, they withdrew it," Bernard said. "The white woman in my lab, her grant is going to be reviewed. ... It's so awful."
The work they're doing, she said, "really should be bipartisan, nonpartisan — not even partisan. It's freaking cancer research."
Ph.D. student reexamines future in scientific research
The political climate is chasing Alex Chapman, a Ph.D. student at MSU who is studying migraines and pain, away from a career in academia.
Chapman, 24, who is originally from Richmond, Virginia, secured a federal grant studying a neuropeptide that's upregulated in people with migraines, before Trump took office in January. Many of her friends and colleagues haven't been so lucky.
"Science is being so vilified that I'm considering careers in other places or different avenues because it's just hard to see a future in a place that doesn't value science at all," she said.
"It's heartbreaking. ... My career options are kind of dwindling, and the more time that passes, the more fellowships and different opportunities just keep becoming defunded," Chapman said, noting that a fellowship she was eyeing through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been axed.
She considered shifting toward public policy work, helping government leaders understand "why we should fund pain research," but then she attended a symposium and heard a woman who works in public policy speak about the cuts there, too.
"She was like, 'This is a great fellowship. It's been defunded. This was an awesome fellowship. It's been defunded,' " Chapman said.
When entrepreneur Elon Musk, who headed the new Department of Government Efficiency early in the Trump administration, criticized the use of federal dollars on scientific studies of legumes and aggression in hamsters, Chapman said, it showed that he couldn't see the full impact of the work.
"If you just simplify it like that, maybe it does seem silly, but you're looking at the small picture," she said. "The point of research is to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. When you understand the best process of planting beans or why certain strains of corn are more susceptible to different fungi, you help people more effectively and efficiently plant food. This will help us in the face of climate change.
"If you understand why a hamster is aggressive after ingesting a certain substance, you understand the role of that substance and how it could potentially affect humans."
That small-picture view — and the cuts made because of it — could have generational impacts on the United States and the world, Chapman said.
"This isn't just shutting down one study that focuses on hamsters fighting," she said. "It's preventing a new generation of scientists from coming into the (field), which is going to stunt our growth as a nation, which is going to prevent new ideas from happening, which is going to lead to ... horrible damage that would take years, if not decades, to recover.
"People are afraid to come out and criticize this because of the way the government has treated them, especially foreign students. When it gets to the point where the government can strike fear in your heart if you speak out against them, especially about something regarding science, it's a very scary place to be."
Local public health departments rattled, services cut
Nick Derusha, the director and health officer of the LMAS District Health Department, which also includes Luce and Mackinac counties, said his part of the eastern Upper Peninsula has been rattled by a Trump administration stop-work order that means there's no money to run clinics that provide medicine like methadone to help people wean off opioid drugs and reduce the risk of overdose deaths in Alger and Schoolcraft counties.
"We take a really holistic approach to that program," Derusha said. "We're not just providing medication-assisted treatment. We have peer recovery coaches. We have community health workers. We have a lot of staff that are there to support them in many other ways, not just the medication.
"When funding is abruptly eliminated like that, we can't just drop people off the caseload. We needed to find a way for them to be able to continue to receive services or some type of off-ramp. We worked with the local hospital, and we agreed for three more months, which is kind of nearing the end here, to continue to provide those services, absent the funding. But the long-term ability of us to do that is not likely."
In addition, Derusha said the LMAS department lost $512,000 a year to pay for a courier system for its laboratory services. Because the district is so sprawling — it covers four U.P. counties — when test samples need to be shipped to the regional lab in Luce County, ordinary mail often doesn't get them delivered quickly enough.
Without the courier system, it means slower results for important public health testing, he said, which could delay treatments and lead to poorer outcomes.
The LMAS District Health Department isn't alone.
The Mid-Michigan Health Department, which includes Clinton, Gratiot and Montcalm counties, announced in April it will no longer investigate or treat latent tuberculosis infections because of "funding cuts and workforce limitations."
Mental health services for school-age children are being cut, too, said Andrea Cole, president of the Ethel and James Flinn Foundation, a Detroit-based nonprofit dedicated to improving the quality, scope, and delivery of mental health services in Michigan.
A $1 billion grant was terminated through the Department of Education in late April to pay for in-school social workers, counselors and other mental health professionals — even though 70% of children who receive mental health services get them through their schools, she said.
"A lot of the federal cuts were to the most vulnerable and underserved populations," Cole said. "Schools are faced with the possibility of laying off those people that they hired under that grant if they don't have funding to continue it."
And the students will be left without that critical mental health support when "they need it more than ever," Cole said.
Hess said all of these cuts, along with proposed legislation — the Big, Beautiful Bill Act, which has passed the U.S. House of Representatives and now is under consideration in the U.S. Senate — that would slash Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, and a state Senate budget proposal that also seeks to trim funding even more, public health in Michigan could dramatically change.
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"We don't want to give the impression that the sky is falling, and that public health is going to pack up and go home," Hess said. "We've been here for 100 years, and we've seen ups and downs over the years. Health officers are used to kind of making things work, but this is sort of a unique situation.
"Community residents are really going to feel this if all of these things that we are watching come to fruition. Public health will not look the same in their communities, in most places."
Contact Kristen Shamus: [e-mail]. Subscribe to the Detroit Free Press.