The Cost of Cutting Health Equity Research

When COVID-19 swept across the United States in 2020, it didn’t just expose health disparities—it magnified them. Black, Indigenous, and low-income communities faced higher death rates, fewer testing resources, and slower vaccine rollouts than their White counterparts. In the aftermath, public health leaders vowed to do better. They promised to rebuild trust and invest in equity-focused research to better understand the social, economic, and structural factors driving these outcomes. However, just a few years later, that progress may now be unraveling.

In early 2025, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) terminated nearly $1.8 billion in research funding across 694 grants. While the NIH has framed these terminations as a realignment with institutional priorities, the numbers tell a different story. A recent JAMA research letter by Liu and colleagues revealed that the cuts disproportionately affected research focused on minority health. The National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD), the NIH’s central hub for funding health equity research, lost nearly 30% of its total funding and 9% of its active grants.

More than half of the terminated awards were research project grants that support ongoing scientific work. One in five were training or career development awards for early-career investigators. These terminations do not just stop individual projects. They shrink the pipeline of researchers who study health inequities and limit the capacity of universities, hospitals, and community partners to ask hard questions about racism, poverty, and health.

This setback comes despite decades of evidence from NIMHD-supported projects that have advanced our understanding of how social determinants like housing, education, and discrimination shape health outcomes. One example is the Jackson Heart Study, a long-standing cohort study focused on cardiovascular disease among African American adults in Jackson, Mississippi. It has shown how factors like neighborhood, chronic stress, and access to care contribute to heart disease risk. Studies like this are possible because institutes such as NIMHD have treated health equity research as a priority, not a side project.

Keeping health equity research funded helps track where preventable disease is concentrated and points to the policies that can reduce those gaps.

Health gaps come from long histories of unfair treatment, and closing them takes steady, well-funded research alongside policy change and community-led action over time. Equity-focused studies give us the data to ask critical questions about why some communities face higher cancer mortality, increased maternal death, or worse mental health outcomes. Quantitative analyses can map where gaps are widest, while qualitative work, such as studies on Black women’s experiences of maternal health care or barriers to mental health services in immigrant communities, shows how those gaps are lived.

Funding decisions often reflect a mix of values, priorities, and fiscal constraints, especially in agencies responsible for serving the whole country. The question is whose health receives protection when money is tight. Do we allow higher risks of illness and death in some communities to fade into the background, or do we treat those patterns as inequities that demand an active response? Large, targeted cuts to health equity research may help close short-term budget gaps, but they also shift burdens onto groups that already face higher rates of preventable disease. They signal that work focused on health disparities can be trimmed more easily than other areas of research.

Trust in institutions like the NIH depends on transparency and a visible, measurable commitment to inclusive research. Funding equity-focused science signals that these institutions are listening, learning, and willing to address systemic problems head-on. Terminations undercut that progress and weaken movements to diversify who conducts research, what questions get asked, and which communities are included in the search for solutions.

NIH leaders and members of Congress face real budget constraints, and funding cuts do not fall on all communities equally. Keeping health equity research funded helps track where preventable disease is concentrated and points to the policies that can reduce those gaps. When grants stay in place, data, stories, and partnerships can continue to guide stronger, fairer public health systems.