Lambda Legal along with law firms Crowell & Moring LLP and Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP has filed a federal lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health over the termination of hundreds of research grants that funded essential research addressing the health of sexual and gender minorities, including critical HIV research, Lambda Legal announced today (Tuesday, May 20).
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ+ Equality and 16 individual health researchers whose funding was eliminated or whose grant applications have been unlawfully withheld from review.
Dr. Carl Streed, associate professor at Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and the research lead for the Gender Care Center at Boston Medical Center, said of the funding cuts, “It is impossible to exaggerate the profoundly devastating impact these terminations have had on my research and those of my fellow plaintiffs.
“These cuts guarantee the particularized health needs of LGBTQ people will go unstudied and unaddressed, terminate clinical trials midstream and severely impact the lives of participants in those trials, and decimate the careers of researchers like me, setting us back decades,” Streed added.
These research grants are worth more than $800 million but are still estimated to equal less than 1 percent of the total NIH portfolio, according to a Lambda Legal press release. Cutting them “is a direct result of the executive orders issued by President Trump that target equity-related grants and forbid federally-funded entities from engaging in diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs, and from recognizing the existence of transgender people.
Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, senior counsel and health care strategist for Lambda Legal, said, “By decreeing that it will not fund research addressing the health needs of LGBTQI+ people, NIH has turned its back on our community and run afoul of its statutory mandates to fund research addressing health disparities of minority population as well as sexual and gender minorities.
“The current administration’s actions communicate that transgender people’s health and the intersectional health needs of LGBTQI+ people are not worthy of consideration or study,” Gonzalez-Pagan continued. “This is not only morally wrong, it is unlawful. What’s more, NIH’s actions endanger the health and wellbeing of not just LGBTQI+ people but the public more broadly, by depriving everyone of innovation and discovery that may arise within the context of this research.
Gonzalez-Pagan pledged that Lambda Legal “will not allow this administration to return us to the dark days when our federal government ignored the health needs of LGBTQI+ people during the height of the AIDS crisis. Members of the LGBTQI+ community know that silence equals death. We will not be ignored. We will not be silenced.”
GLMA Executive Director Alex Sheldon added, “The NIH’s mass termination of LGBTQ+ health research funding is more than a bureaucratic exercise; it’s a targeted attack on our communities. It has dismantled entire research teams, forced early-career researchers out of the field, and left LGBTQ+ participants without the care or compensation they were promised.
“This decision sends a chilling message: that LGBTQ+ lives and health don’t matter. GLMA is fighting back because health equity demands evidence and because our community deserves to be understood, not erased,” Sheldon said.
Since the new administration took office, NIH, under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. has cancelled or substantially reduced 669 grants, of which at least 323 — nearly half of them — addressed the health of sexual and gender minority groups.
Justin Kingsolver, litigation partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP and vice chair of Lambda Legal’s National Leadership Council, explained: “Our law firm is proud to represent our courageous clients — who are some of the most accomplished medical researchers in this country — in their fight to protect equality, ensure due process, and preserve the rule of law.”
The lawsuit, GLMA v. NIH, is the sixth lawsuit Lambda Legal has filed against the Trump administration. Read more about Lambda Legal’s battle against the Trump administration here.
— Tammye Nash
