Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Trump Halts $2B For Harvard Over DEI; Scientists 'Excited' School Isn't Bowing
NPR: Trump Administration Freezes More Than $2.2 Billion After Harvard Rejects Its Demands
The Trump administration responded quickly to Harvard University's defiance on Monday, freezing more than $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and contracts after the university rejected demands that it change hiring, admissions and other policies. Earlier in the day, Alan Garber, Harvard's president, said in a letter to faculty and students that the university would not submit to a list of demands made last Friday. Among them are that it eliminate DEI programs, screen international students who are "supportive of terrorism or anti-Semitism" and ensure "viewpoint diversity" in its hiring. At stake, the government said, was some $9 billion in federal funding. (Mehta, 4/14)
Stat: Harvard Scientists Brace For The Fallout From $2.2 Billion Cut In Federal Grants
Across Boston, researchers waited wearily for blowback from the administration. It wasn’t just Harvard University. Although protests have almost exclusively occurred on undergraduate campuses, the Administration’s cuts to funding have hit medical schools and their associated hospitals, which get substantial grants that NIH and other federal agencies dole out. (Mast, 4/15)
Stat: Under Pressure From Trump, Universities Look To Reform NIH Funding
As they battle the Trump administration in court over its plan to slash the amount of overhead and other “indirect costs” paid to recipients of National Institutes of Health research grants, universities have begun discussing alternative funding ideas in hopes of finding an approach that might be acceptable to all sides. (Oza, 4/15)
The Boston Globe: MGB Doctors Press Hospital Leaders To Stand Up To Trump’s Threats
As the Trump administration threatens to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from Harvard University and its affiliates, more than 220 physicians and other workers at Mass General Brigham have called on leaders of the health system to reject a litany of demands by the government. In a signed letter sent to top executives on Monday, employees of the Harvard-affiliated system said MGB and other teaching hospitals in the country should band together and stand up for diversity, evidence-based medicine, and preservation of constitutional rights. (Saltzman, 4/14)
More on DEI and immigration —
The Washington Post: DOGE Is Collecting Federal Data To Remove Immigrants From Housing, Jobs
The Trump administration is using personal data normally protected from dissemination to find undocumented immigrants where they work, study and live, often with the goal of removing them from their housing and the workforce. At the Department of Housing and Urban Development, for example, officials are working on a rule that would ban mixed-status households — in which some family members have legal status and others don’t — from public housing, according to multiple staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. (Siegel, Natanson and Meckler, 4/15)
San Diego Union-Tribune: ‘Able To Happen Again’: Local Japanese American Historians Warn Of Trump’s Use Of 1798 Wartime Law
Kay Ochi’s parents were 21 and 22 years old when they were forced to leave San Diego, where they were born, and taken to an incarceration camp in the desert of Poston, Arizona, simply because of their Japanese heritage. “That was three years of pure hell,” said Ochi, a third-generation Japanese American, or Sansei, who is president of the Japanese American Historical Society of San Diego. (Taketa, 4/13)
KFF Health News: Deportation Fears Add To Mental Health Problems Confronting Colorado Resort Town Workers
When Adolfo Román García-Ramírez walks home in the evening from his shift at a grocery store in this central Colorado mountain town, sometimes he thinks back on his childhood in Nicaragua. Adults, he recollects, would scare the kids with tales of the “Mona Bruja,” or “Monkey Witch.” Step too far into the dark, they told him, and you might just get snatched up by the giant monstrous monkey who lives in the shadows. Now, when García-Ramírez looks over his shoulder, it’s not monster monkeys he is afraid of. It’s U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. (Skowlund, 4/15)
