“Rewrite All of Your Woke Science”: Early-Career Researcher Says NIH’s Anti-DEI Agenda is Undermining Agency’s Mission
Dr. Michael D. Green says his work is being censored to fit an “amorphous political agenda.”
Earlier this month, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, testified at an oversight hearing before the House Appropriations Committee about the Trump administration’s cuts to medical research.
According to a recent investigation by Vox, the NIH has slashed research, almost across the board, including in fields like cancer, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, mental health, kidney disease, and more. In 2025, the agency gave out 2,000 fewer grants than it did in 2024, and this year, it is on track to do even less. The National Cancer Institute has given out just a fraction of the funding it has been allocated to spend.
Meanwhile, the agency has lost thousands of workers and senior staff to workforce reductions, and sixteen institutes are currently headed up by acting directors. The Trump administration has also been targeting research funding for universities. The cuts are part of a larger White House anti-diversity agenda that has scientists looking outside the U.S. for opportunities.
During the hearing, Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D–Conn.) asked Bhattacharya about the loss of opportunities for early-career researchers, noting “they’re looking at how they change their careers or where they go with this.”
“It’s been harder and harder for early-career scientists to get their grants funded,” the NIH director replied. “Once upon a time, in the 1980s, you were in your mid 30s when you got your first large RO1, large first grant, and now you have to be in your mid 40s. You have to do one, two, three postdocs. And I’m thinking of how to fix that as NIH, because the NIH has undertaken lots of activities to try to fix that.”
While the response was welcomed by the committee, many scientists remain skeptical of the director’s leadership. One is population health researcher Dr. Michael D. Green.
Green is an early-career scientist, having earned his PhD in December 2025. He studies healthcare discrimination, diversity and representation in clinical trials, and social determinants of health and cardiovascular disease. His motivations to do this work are deeply personal: his own family’s history with heart disease.
“I’m a Black man, and this is something that…it’s important to note because a lot of the experiences of my grandparents and other people in my family have…deeply…affected how I view…health care in America,” Green told Important Context. “And so a lot of them, they don’t really trust…traditional allopathic medicine—so we go to a hospital…they felt that they were kind of dismissed. Often, people weren’t listened to, especially some of the older ones.”
Green said that when his family members had issues like hypertension, they often went untreated and progressed to more serious conditions.
Critical—and personal—as his research is, Green’s focus on minority communities put him on a collision course with the Trump administration.
Green applied for an NIH grant in September 2023, under the Biden administration. He went for a F99/K00 Predoctoral to Postdoctoral Fellow Transition Award, aiming to study links between reported discrimination in healthcare settings and heart attacks, strokes, and cognitive health. F and K awards cover both research and training, and are meant to assist early-career researchers in the transition out of their PhD programs.
At 70 pages, the application took Green nine months to plan and write, and required four letters of recommendation. For good measure, he also obtained two letters of support for the proposals. Approval finally came in August 2024, two months before the election, and as far as Green was concerned, that was that. All the NIH requires from its grantees are progress reports on how the work is progressing.
But things changed under the Trump administration, which began re-reviewing grants to weed out anything it viewed as “DEI” using specific search terms. The NIH has denied having a list of banned words, though reporting has cast doubt on the agency’s claim.
Green began hearing about research cuts in March last year—one month before Bhattacharya took over at NIH. In July, he received emails about his awards, informing him that to “proceed with funding consideration, the scope…must be renegotiated to make it consistent” with the administration’s priorities.
Put simply, he would need to “remove any DEI language” from his applications.
The timing could not have been worse for Green. The emails arrived, he explained, as his family was planning the funeral for his grandfather, who had passed away from congestive heart failure.
“I get this, ‘Hey, you have one week to rewrite all of your woke science’ requests while I’m preparing for my grandfather’s funeral, who died of heart disease—the same condition that I’m being told arbitrarily, hey, ‘that experience doesn’t matter,’” Green said. “It’s almost perfectly poetic.”
For researchers like Green, waiting on already approved NIH grants is not merely an inconvenience. It is also a financial burden and injects uncertainty into budding careers.
“I’m waiting for the approval of my NIH grant, which I applied to because I was told it was going to be a seamless transition to a postdoc position,” Green explained. “And so in that process of being told, ‘Hey, I know that you applied to this thing in 2023, but you need to change your work now…that has cost me real income—I haven’t been paid the past two months. It’s cost me…health insurance. I’m paying for a catastrophic health insurance plan, so in case I get hit by a car, I don’t get put in…life-crippling debt, like we do in America.”
To Green, the new demands from the NIH were more than a headache—they were hypocrisy. For years, he noted, Bhattacharya has purported to be a champion of free speech and academic freedom, claiming to have been denied both during the pandemic when his infection-based COVID-19 herd immunity strategy was rejected by the scientific mainstream. He even unsuccessfully sued Biden administration officials, alleging that they had orchestrated this supposed censorship.
“For me…my biggest issue wasn’t him saying my science is bad,” Green said, explaining that he was most troubled by “the fact that this new administrative process has been put in front of me where it’s not just, ‘Hey, I don’t agree with you,’ it’s, ‘Hey, I don’t agree with you, and change everything here.’”
At the hearing, Bhattacharya faced questions about the anti-DEI push, but assured committee members that he was in no way making research funding decisions based on politics, but rather good science.
“So the NIH, if we don’t do research that improves the health of minority populations, we’re not accomplishing our mission. It is vital. We’re not accomplishing our mission,” he said. “We have to do research that improves the health of minority populations, right? So I don’t think there’s anybody that disagrees with that. Research that is not rigorous, not as overly politicized, that doesn’t actually have a chance of improving minority health, I don’t want to fund it.”
Bhattacharya’s conciliatory tone was markedly different from that of the December 2025 piece he penned with his principal deputy director, Dr. Matthew Memoli for The Spectator, boasting that they had “cured DEI” at the NIH. While Bhattacharya and Memoli did not define DEI, they suggested it was a ‘corrupting’ ideology requiring “de facto loyalty oaths.”
“Scientists learned that the best way to maximize their chance of a slice of NIH money was to promise that their work would help achieve racial nirvana, however remote from utopian ideological pursuits the proposed work actually was,” the pair wrote. “Most scientists obsequiously complied to avoid the risk of career harm, whether they were true believers or not.”
Bhattacharya’s ambiguous position on research affecting minority groups highlights the difficult line he has tried to walk, gesturing at the public health mainstream even while casting doubt on it and allying with fringe figures like Robert Kennedy Jr. Bhattacharya has previously faced pushback from inside his own agency for contradicting himself.
At his first town hall, Bhattacharya was heckled when he told staffers that studies of the impacts of specific policies like redlining that affect minority populations would not be cut.
”As the program officer who oversees this research, I will tell you my studies have been terminated,” a voice from the crowd protested.
Bhattacharya then clarified that studies on structural racism were meritless and would be cut, and the heckler responded, “What do you think redlining is?”
For Green, the administration’s anti-DEI push represents an “amorphous political agenda” that is fundamentally at odds with scientific discovery.
“I think that to say that there’s no situation where inclusivity matters, it’s not only…ignorant, it’s also just kind of you’re closing off a whole side of your scientific possibilities.”
He warned that the encroachment of the administration’s politics on research has created a new era of uncertainty—and a bad precedent for the future. Green noted that the loss of research opportunities has been driving scientists away from American universities and into the arms of the corporate sector.
“You can go to industry where you’re probably not going to do something that’s entirely mission aligned, but again, at least you can, you know, support your family and kind of keep doing your work,” he said.