Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Trump Halts $2B For Harvard Over DEI; Scientists 'Excited' School Isn't Bowing
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)
Across Boston, researchers waited wearily for blowback from the administration. It wasn鈥檛 just Harvard University. Although protests have almost exclusively occurred on undergraduate campuses, the Administration鈥檚 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)
As they battle the Trump administration in court over its plan to slash the amount of overhead and other 鈥渋ndirect costs鈥 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)
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 鈥
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 鈥 in which some family members have legal status and others don鈥檛 鈥 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)
Kay Ochi鈥檚 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. 鈥淭hat was three years of pure hell,鈥 said Ochi, a third-generation Japanese American, or Sansei, who is president of the Japanese American Historical Society of San Diego. (Taketa, 4/13)
麻豆女优 Health News: Deportation Fears Add To Mental Health Problems Confronting Colorado Resort Town Workers
When Adolfo Rom谩n Garc铆a-Ram铆rez 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 鈥淢ona Bruja,鈥 or 鈥淢onkey Witch.鈥 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 Garc铆a-Ram铆rez looks over his shoulder, it鈥檚 not monster monkeys he is afraid of. It鈥檚 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. (Skowlund, 4/15)