The Health Department’s office to improve the health of minorities has abruptly terminated more than half its existing grants, saying they didn’t focus on the Trump administration’s new priorities of addressing infertility and encouraging exercise.
Some grantees provided cancer screenings or postpartum home visits. Others worked to reduce first-responder suicide or decrease obesity among Native American youth. All of the funds came from the Office of Minority Health, which the administration tried to shutter last year.
Administration officials wrote to grantees that going forward, awards should directly advance “reducing overmedicalization in health care by addressing the root causes of infertility” including hormonal imbalances, endometriosis, uterine fibroids, low sperm count, low testosterone levels and erectile dysfunction as root causes.
Grants should also support programs that promote “regular physical activity and exercise,” according to the Aug. 25 letters obtained by NOTUS.
Trending
The termination letters were sent to 16 county, state and nonprofit grantees, according to a list from a source familiar with the agency’s decision and an online database. The 16 grants totalled $38 million over four years. The grantees had received the first two years of funding.
Several grantees told NOTUS they had been fully expecting to receive their third funding installment for the four-year grants and were caught entirely by surprise. They’d worried last year, when President Donald Trump’s budget proposed cutting Office of Minority Health grants by 40%, but thought their funding was safe after that never transpired.
“We thought we had weathered the storm,” said Christopher Joseph, the executive director of EngageWell, which was administering a grant awarded to Brooklyn-based nonprofit Housing Works.
Joseph said his group was using its grant to help hypertension patients monitor their blood pressure from home and deliver boxes of fresh produce and eggs to 150 New Yorkers every other week as part of a program called “Food as Medicine.”
He’d assumed the food-delivery program would be safe from cuts, because it dovetails with the focus on preventive health in Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again movement.
“When MAHA came about we thought great, this aligns with their priorities,” Joseph said.
Many of the termination letters contained virtually identical language. They said the awards being canceled no longer advance “current agency priorities.”
The letters were signed by Eric West, acting chief grants officer at the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, and Mahyar Mofidi, deputy assistant secretary for minority health.
The administration wrote to several grantees working on maternal health that while “maternal and infant health are important issues,” their work “does not advance minority health with regards to OMH’s current priority areas.”
One of those grantees, the Denver-based nonprofit Illuminate Colorado, sends nurses to the homes of minority women in the days after they give birth, checking to make sure they’re able to care for themselves and their newborns.
“It was news to us that maternal and infant fatality prevention wasn’t a priority,” said the group’s co-executive director Jillian Fabricius.
The Department of Health and Human Services didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The cuts are just the latest example of grants abruptly terminated by the Trump administration as it seeks to put its own stamp on the aid and research being funded by the federal government. Over the summer it canceled 150 awards funding health delivery research and previously delayed hundreds of millions of dollars in grants for additional political review.
Under the Biden administration, the Office of Minority Health funded dozens of grants every year. Now the agency’s website lists only two funding opportunities for fiscal year 2026, one for lupus research and the other to address chronic disease among Native Americans.
The office was created under President Ronald Reagan. Its grant awards surged during President Joe Biden’s first year but last year declined back to 2019 levels. The Trump administration appears to be further slashing funding; in addition to the 16 canceled grants, 13 that were funded last year appear to be unfunded this year, according to a public database.
Last year, Kennedy tried to eliminate the Office of Minority Health entirely as he reorganized the department and shed around 20,000 employees, though Congress ultimately declined to go along with the plan.
Trump has continued to target minority-focused offices within HHS: In his fiscal 2027 budget, he proposed eliminating the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, zeroing out the Minority HIV/AIDS office and slashing the Office of Minority Health funding by 40%.
One grantee, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, said its program to reduce infant and maternal mortality among Black families in the Arkansas Delta will likely end without the grant.
Spokesperson Leslie Taylor said she was not sure why the grant was canceled, though she said “it’s certainly a big issue in our state considering we’re number one in the country,” referring to the high infant and maternal mortality rates in Arkansas.
Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colorado), the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce health subcommittee, asked the administration to explain the grant terminations and its new funding priorities.
“It is shocking that OMH under any leadership would prioritize erectile dysfunction over the health and wellbeing of infants and new mothers, yet that is precisely what you are doing,” she wrote Thursday to Brian Christine, the assistant secretary for health.
Authors
Contributor
