By Anna Bauman, Jack Lee
See original post here.
Tremon Chandler, a 25-year-old from Ohio, moved to San Francisco four years ago with $3,000 in his pocket to chase his dream of becoming a rapper. Quickly realizing his savings would not go far in California, he slept in his car and crashed with a co-worker before finding housing.
But life stabilized when Chandler enrolled as a participant in the Black Economic Equity Movement, a clinical trial run by UCSF, which aimed to measure the impact of guaranteed income on local Black young adults.
Over the past year, Chandler used monthly $500 payments from the program to cover studio time, music videos and performances. He said the extra income gave him a sense of security while allowing him to invest in his budding music career between work shifts at a Sonic restaurant.
Chandler and another study participant, a 26-year-old Emeryville woman, told the Chronicle that the guaranteed income trial has boosted their careers, mental health and living situations — but conclusive evidence from the large-scale UCSF study may never be available.
In late March, the National Institutes of Health notified UCSF that funding for the $9 million project had been terminated because it “no longer effectuates agency priorities,” according to the termination letter. The study is among nearly a hundred federally funded research projects in California, worth more than $300 million in total, that the Trump administration has canceled in an apparent effort to target science that relates to diversity, equity or inclusion.
Much of the study’s funding, including the guaranteed income for participants, has already been spent or distributed, but the research has been brought to a halt shortly before the finish line, said Sheri Lippman, principal investigator for the project and a professor of medicine at UCSF.
Without funding to support them, she said, the research team can no longer conduct final interviews, analyze years worth of data, or disseminate their findings to participants and policymakers, effectively squandering millions in taxpayer money that was awarded to UCSF under the Biden administration.
“It was like your world crumbles,” Lippman said. “This is not just a job for our staff and for the investigators — this is work we really believe in.”
In total, UCSF has lost 14 NIH grants totaling nearly $46 million, according to the university.
In addition to terminating NIH and National Science Foundation grants, President Donald Trump’s administration has canceled others awarded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Health and Human Services, Department of Defense and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others, public records show. Some of the cuts appear to be aimed at DEI-related research, some at research focusing on vaccine hesitancy, while with others the reasons are less clear.
The White House said in February that the U.S. government spends “too much money on programs, contracts, and grants that do not promote the interests of the American people.”
The Department of Government Efficiency, an office created by Trump through an executive order in January and headed by Elon Musk, is tracking the canceled grants online with a “Wall of Receipts,” which includes a savings estimate per termination.
In a February executive order, Trump directed federal agencies to review their grants and contracts “in consultation with the agency’s DOGE Team Lead,” modifying or cutting them as needed “to reduce overall Federal spending or reallocate spending to promote efficiency and advance the policies of my Administration.”
Across the Bay Area, grant termination notices have thrown organizations into chaos and uncertainty as they shutter projects, lay off employees, or scramble to shore up major gaps in funding.
Local impacted groups include San Francisco nonprofits that work with the homeless and conduct educational research with a focus on equity issues. An EPA-funded grant for improving air quality inside Oakland public schools was also terminated, according to the California Department of Public Health.
The idea for the UCSF project emerged about four years ago, when the NIH announced it was seeking to fund unusually innovative and transformative projects to address health disparities. The agency acknowledged in the funding announcement that structural racism and other social factors can impact public health.
When Lippman learned about the opportunity, she said, one topic immediately came to mind: guaranteed income, an intervention that provides low-income people with regular cash assistance, no strings attached, which was growing in popularity at the time.
Researchers had launched a wave of studies on the topic as cities such as Stockton and Oakland rolled out guaranteed income pilot programs, Lippman said, but none were focused specifically on Black young adults, who are at high risk for mental and other health issues as they transition to adulthood.
“It’s also a time when they get set on a trajectory — a little extra cash could be the difference between going to school and seeking training or abandoning education altogether,” Lippman said.
After a competitive and peer-reviewed selection process, Lippman and two other principal investigators, Margaret Libby and Marguerita Lightfoot, won an NIH grant in 2021 and launched a clinical trial in partnership with MyPath, a San Francisco nonprofit. The team provided optional financial mentoring alongside monthly payments to 300 low-income Black residents in San Francisco and Oakland between the ages of 18 and 24.
Researchers had spent two years collecting information from the young adults about their financial, emotional and physical well-being. Final interviews were scheduled throughout this summer for the last group of participants, but the NIH canceled the grant in a March 21 email to the university.
“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,” the NIH termination letter stated, adding that diversity, equity and inclusion studies “are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race … which harms the health of Americans.”
The university submitted an appeal on behalf of Lippman on April 15, arguing that researchers designed the trial with rigorous and evidence-based methods “at the core of scientific inquiry.”
“They’re on a mission to end anything they conceive to be even remotely DEI-related, and they have equated our project with a DEI initiative, even though we’re looking at an intervention that could benefit people across America,” Lippman said.
NIH said in a statement that the agency wants to “Make America Healthy Again,” and is prioritizing research that “directly affects the health of Americans.”
“We remain dedicated to restoring our agency to its tradition of upholding gold-standard, evidence-based science,” the agency said.
It’s unclear where public support stands for Trump’s slashing of funding for research he dislikes. According to an April poll from Pew Research Center, more than half of Americans opposed cuts the administration has made to federal agencies. Republicans and Democrats were split on ending federal DEI initiatives.
In federal court, lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and California Attorney General Rob Bonta, among others, are seeking to restore funding for NIH grants canceled “without any reasonable explanations.”
In the meantime, MyPath and UCSF have laid off two project staff members and a postdoctoral researcher who is now hunting for other jobs in academia while working to finish a portion of the guaranteed income project without pay.
The postdoc, who spoke to the Chronicle on the condition of anonymity out of fear that doing so could hurt future grant prospects, said they were elated to work on a study with potential policy impact and disheartened by its sudden end.
“We’re losing what our participants gave us,” the researcher said. “They stayed with us for two years, completed surveys, gave of their time and effort — we’re losing an opportunity to share their story.”
Lippman said the research team worked with community leaders to design the study and developed close relationships with participants, offering supportive resources and staying in frequent communication with them.
But the termination has forced the team to break its commitment to members of the Black community, which has historically suffered from exploitative research practices, Lippman said.
“The community we’re working with hasn’t always trusted researchers,” she said. “Ethical researchers have been fighting to gain back trust.”
Without much faith in the appeal process, Lippman said she has created a fundraising page and contacted philanthropists in an effort to scrounge up dollars from alternative sources. The researcher hopes someone “sees an opportunity to finish something that really could make a huge difference.”
Participating in the guaranteed income trial has already had an impact for Chandler, who performs under the artist name BDNTre. He has now been signed by a Los Angeles management company and said he feels capable of breaking through in the music industry.
“Five-hundred dollars can take the right person a long way,” he said. “You can put yourself in better places.”
