BETHESDA, Md. — For months, Vanderbilt sociologist Tara McKay had waited for the notice that her grant had been renewed for another year, a signoff that had always been routine. Instead, while sick at home, she got a panicked phone call from her program officer at the National Institutes of Health that she had 24 hours to alter the language of her grant title — otherwise it would be at risk of not being funded.
McKay is familiar with the notion that partisan politics can have a deep impact on science and health. The grant, after all, was tracking the ripple effects of the decision by Tennessee’s Republican governor to reject nearly $9 million in federal funding for HIV prevention. It was initially titled “A Multimethod Assessment of the Clinical, Economic & Social Impact of the Rejection of Federal HIV Prevention Funds in Tennessee.” Now she and her collaborator felt compelled to remove mention of the governor’s decision and describe their work as evaluating the “Impact of Evolving HIV Prevention and Care Strategies in Tennessee.”
While wording changes may seem trivial amid the Trump administration’s broad upheaval of federally funded research, such compromises can alter the course of projects and the questions scientists address. They can also be demoralizing. To McKay, that new title “de-partisans” the rejecting of funding — reframing the political decision to turn away HIV funds. But she felt it was better than losing the grant. “If that project ended, basically the state gets a free pass, right?” she said in an interview.
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