Updated April 15, 2025 at 05:02 AM ET
Tara McKay was home on the last night in February when she received an email that made her doubt — if only for a moment — the worthiness of her career.
It was a message from a branch of the National Institutes of Health: Funding for a research project she leads at Vanderbilt University's LGBTQ+ Policy Lab had been terminated because it involved transgender issues.
"Research programs based on gender identity are often unscientific, have little identifiable return on investment, and do nothing to enhance the health of many Americans," read the letter, which NPR reviewed.
The letter struck a deeply personal chord for McKay.
"It is certainly very hard to read and hear that someone out there thinks that, and someone representing the government thinks that," McKay said, reflecting on reading it. "I felt sad for science. I felt sad for queer people who are being erased and marginalized and told that they're not valued."
McKay's research explores health disparities faced by older individuals who identify as LGBTQ+, a group that experiences disproportionately high rates of some chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease, depression and anxiety disorders and cognitive decline, compared to their heterosexual peers.
The project is now one of more than 1,000 grants for which funding has been canceled by the Department of Health of Human Services, of which the NIH is part, for focusing on issues that don't align with the Trump administration's priorities.
She's among many researchers concerned about their rights to free speech under the current administration. And what she's hearing from colleagues — how some are trying to obscure the focus of their studies in order to stay on the good side of the administration — reminds her of another chapter of her career, one she's not keen to revisit.
"I worked for a long time in African countries where same-sex sex was criminalized. This is the work that you had to do to be able to do anything at all," she said. "You had to hide in plain sight and you couldn't call anything what it was."
"We can't speak the way that we normally would"
Along with LGBTQ+ health, research projects related to diversity, vaccine hesitancy and HIV prevention have also been targeted for funding cuts, according to a lawsuit filed against the NIH by scientists and health groups earlier this month. That's in addition to the administration's firing of thousands of researchers and scientists from government agencies, including the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Climate science is another major target. The terms "climate crisis," "climate science," "clean energy," "environmental justice" and "environmental quality" all appear on a growing list of words and phrases that are being removed from government websites and documents compiled by PEN America. Other lists of words that are objectionable to the new administration have been published by The New York Times, ProPublica and other media outlets.
One environmental researcher NPR spoke to, whose employer receives federal funding, confirmed that they have been advised to avoid the terms "climate change," "sustainable" and "sustainability." Even "biodiversity" is of concern to some of their colleagues because it includes the word "diversity."
"We've just had cold water thrown on every single topic that involves humans and the environment," said the researcher, who did not want to be identified by either their name or employer because they fear both getting fired and their employer getting punished with funding cuts.
A conservation professional who works for a local government in the Pacific Northwest said it felt "demoralizing" to scrub out several objectionable words from a detailed federal grant application they've been working on since last November. They also requested anonymity for fear of losing their job and because of concerns about their immigration status as a dual citizen.
"It's not that I don't feel safe using those words. What I don't feel good about is that we might not get the funding," they said. "It also feels like it's fundamentally wrong that we can't speak the way that we normally would to tell our stories. To tell the story of why we need this money to do this work that's going to benefit the public."
The White House has said it did not create a list of banned words and that it is leaving it up to federal agencies to interpret how to comply with President Trump's numerous executive orders. Neither the White House, NIH or HHS responded to NPR's specific questions about the objectionable words, why the Trump administration is targeting certain areas of research or scientists feeling like their freedom of speech is under threat. However, deputy press secretary Anna Kelly shared the following statement:
"President Trump is leading the most transparent administration in history. He regularly takes questions from the media, communicates directly to the public, and signed an Executive Order to protect free speech on his first day back in office. He will continue to fight against censorship while evaluating all federal spending to identify waste, fraud, and abuse."
"Dampening effect" on U.S. scientific research
Regarding LGBTQ+ health, the administration has now ordered the NIH to study the physical and mental health effects of undergoing gender transition, according to an internal memo obtained by NPR. Critics say the move is looking for "a political answer" that would support the administration's claims that regret is widespread among patients who undergo gender-affirming care — though a solid body of evidence finds that regret rates are very low.
The alternatingly explicit yet murky guidance, combined with the risk of funding cuts, has many researchers worried, and is resulting in a "dampening effect" on U.S. scientific research, according to Dr. Ana Diez Roux, an epidemiologist and director of the Drexel Urban Health Collaborative at Drexel University.
"It's shocking that we're experiencing this in the year 2025 in the United States," she said, "a country that has really been a leader, and in many ways a model, for open, free science."
Diez Roux is one of the co-authors of an open letter published in March and signed by nearly 2,000 leading scientists, including dozens of Nobel Prize winners, warning that the Trump administration is creating a "climate of fear" in U.S. science.
The White House, NIH and HHS did not respond to NPR's requests for comment on that allegation.
"Science is about exploration. It's about proposing new ideas and hypotheses. It's about testing them. It's about debating them," Diez Roux said. "We can't do that if certain areas are deemed off-limits or if we can't use certain words."
Not every scientist feels intimidated from speaking out about or pursuing their work now, though. Some have felt unfairly attacked in the court of public opinion for holding dissenting views in the recent past — though it's not the same as facing government-orchestrated funding cuts that can delay or outright stop research.
Alina Chan is a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard specializing in gene therapy and cell engineering. In 2020, she was one of the leading voices who called for the lab leak origin theory of COVID-19 to be investigated — a position for which she says she faced a "huge backlash" at the time, from stakeholders ranging from the Chinese government to the scientific community in the U.S.
"In terms of freedom, I was of course free to write it," Chan said about expressing her views. "But it didn't protect me from the kind of online harassment, intimidation and even, I think, professional interference that resulted from me speaking up."
Today, now that public opinion has shifted more in favor of the lab leak theory, and the CIA says it favors the theory too — albeit only with "low confidence" — Chan said she feels "definitely much freer" speaking out publicly about the lab leak hypothesis. But she still faces pushback from scientists who say they have seen no credible scientific evidence to substantiate the lab leak claim.
"Within the scientific establishment and many more rigid or dogmatic establishments, it is still not free to talk about the lab leak hypothesis," Chan said. "If you want them to acknowledge that it came from a lab, it's tantamount to asking them for a confession that they were wrong."
Chan also sees a through line between what she feels was a lack of transparency about the possible origins of COVID-19 and scientists' evolving understanding of the virus and the new Trump administration's funding cuts — the most recent of which were so severe, they had employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention trying to figure out which divisions or branches still remained.
"I wish that it hadn't come to this point, this boiling point, where there's so much distrust amongst the people in charge and the scientists, and also the public, that now the entire scientific community is getting punished for these conflicts."
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