TheBody’s Tim Murphy spoke with Dr. Jon Rendina, Senior Director of Research at The Institute for Health Research & Policy about the sudden cancellation of a significant multimillion-dollar grant to build a research hub at Whitman-Walker’s Max Robinson Center.

Excerpt:

“Leaders at the longtime LGBTQ-serving health center Whitman-Walker in Washington, D.C. were super-excited. They were about to begin construction of a biomedical research hub inside Whitman-Walker’s new Max Robinson Center in Ward 8—a Southeast district that not only is one of the Blackest and poorest parts of the nation’s capital, but also has one of the highest concentrations of people living with HIV.

In 2022, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had awarded Whitman-Walker a $2 million grant to build the research hub. The decision came after a standard review process, which was widely known to be highly rigorous and conducted by experts in the field. The hub aimed to ensure that Whitman-Walker does its part to better engage Black Americans in HIV clinical research. It would exist within the same building that already provides health care to largely Black Washingtonians living with, or at risk for, HIV—thus setting up a streamlined opportunity to invite those patients into research trials.

Everything was going great. Last year, officials from NIH visited the Robinson building—a mark of their commitment to giving money not only to clinical trials themselves but, in a relatively rare move for the agency, to the building of facilities to conduct such trials. Early this year, Whitman-Walker—with its partner in the venture, George Washington University—had already spent about $667,000 of the $2 million grant to complete the center’s design. In recent weeks, they were about to go forward with the actual build.

“Our dream was that someday, this center would contribute to research that would lead us toward a cure for HIV,” says Jonathon Rendina, Ph.D., M.P.H., Whitman-Walker’s senior director of research and one of the people leading the project.

Then, on March 21, Rendina got a letter from NIH telling him that the grant had been canceled and that Whitman-Walker would not be receiving the rest of the money.

The reason: The project goes against the Trump 2.0 administration’s opposition to research projects that focus on creating greater equity for groups that historically have been shut out of efforts to provide top health care, such as Black Americans.

“This award no longer effectuates agency priorities,” read the letter, a redacted version of which Rendina showed to TheBody. “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, and ultimately do not enhance health, lengthen life, or reduce illness. Worse, so-called diversity, equity and inclusion (“DEI”) studies are often used to support discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics, which harms the health of Americans.”

The letter went on to say that, while historically the NIH suspended rather than flat-out canceled problematic grants, hence allowing grant recipients to make fixes, “no corrective action is possible here. The premise of this award is incompatible with agency priorities.”

Rendina says that he and his colleagues were shocked by the news. Amid the new Trump administration’s swift and stunning decimation of federal health agencies and U.S.-funded programs, Whitman-Walker leaders knew that some of their federal grants would likely be taken away; “I had even ranked our grants by risk of termination,” says Rendina. But they thought that the grant for the research hub, which had received a nearly perfect score in the NIH’s pre-approval process, would not be cut. After all, “it funds construction of a center where state-of-the-art research of all kinds can occur,” Rendina says.

…

As for Whitman-Walker, which needs to recoup about $1.4 million, they are appealing the cancellation of their grant to build their HIV research center, says Rendina. Beyond that, he says, the foundation arm of Whitman-Walker is “working very hard with our boards and partners to identify new sources of funding. We’re very near construction time, so it’s a race against the clock. We’re also looking at how to trim from the project elements that would be nice-to-have rather than must-have.”

When asked what he thinks the underlying reasons are for the administration’s deep, ongoing cuts to Whitman-Walker and other grantees, Rendina answered circumspectly, choosing to take the administration’s claims about “low-value research” at face value.

“I think,” he says, “that it’s the result of a fundamental misunderstanding that these programs are biased, when, in fact, equity-based research is an attempt to eliminate the historical impact of bias.”

Read the full article here: https://www.thebody.com/news/hiv/hiv-research-funding-cancellations-whitman-walker-april-2025