Appeasing Trump Is a Futile Sugar High

[Celerity]

How the American Diabetes Association tried to hide a critical editorial published in its own journal—to no avail

https://prospect.org/2026/07/10/appeasing-trump-american-diabetes-association-nih-dei/



When Dr. Steven Kahn, a distinguished physician specializing in diabetes, published a co-authored editorial in April in the journal Diabetes Care criticizing the Trump administration’s proposal to cut the National Institutes of Health’s funding by $5 billion, he had no way of knowing that the article would result in his forcible ejection from the American Diabetes Association’s annual Scientific Sessions just two months later. Well-placed sources tell us that the removal was ordered by the ADA’s own top officials, likely fearful of offending the administration. The ADA’s CEO, Charles Henderson, later apologized. It’s another case of a large institution making a futile effort to appease the Trump White House at the expense of its own principles.

Dr. Kahn’s sin was his effort to distribute copies of his editorial, in a flagship journal published by the same ADA. In a video published on MedPage Today, Kahn, with colleagues Drs. Justin Ryder and Aaron Kelly, is seen handing out packets of paper when they are confronted and hustled out by a motley crew of security personnel, local law enforcement, and ADA leadership. Kahn’s papers are aggressively yanked away by a facility security guard. National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jay Bhattacharya had been scheduled to give the keynote speech before canceling at the last minute. But by attempting to censor their members and kowtowing to the administration, the ADA put a national spotlight on an editorial that would have otherwise barely made a blip.

The editorial, published in Diabetes Care by Kahn, Cheryl A.M. Anderson, John B. Buse, and Elizabeth Selvin, criticizes the Trump administration budget proposal to cut NIH funding by $5 billion, a threat still posed at the time of its late-April publishing date. The proposal states that the NIH “broke the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health,” mostly citing DEI initiatives. While that funding cut has been rejected by the House Appropriations Committee, the effect of slow-walking spending and consequently freezing grants has been a serious disruption to American scientific research. The result is a more than 50 percent cut in the value of competitive awards doled out by the NIH since the Biden administration. Time is a structural necessity for scientific study and research.

Delays in appropriations, exacerbated by DOGE cuts to NIH staff, undermine long-term studies, which are sometimes forced to pause or lay off researchers while awaiting approval or confirmation of continued funding. As the editorial points out, in the second Trump administration, there have only been 84 Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs)—announcements of grant money—compared to 787 the year before. Although the NIH funding was eventually reinstated after months, damage was already done, Dr. Buse, a co-author of the editorial and a distinguished professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told the Prospect. “That causes a big disruption in the way that research labs and clinical trials can proceed,” Buse said. “Many sites in which the participants in the trials were enrolled lost opportunities for collecting data, and people who were very worried about their employment, who left.”

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[wiggs]

1. He is an unreliable negotiator, leader, spouse, business partner, father, diplomat, and any other aspect

of a human being. Shouldn't this be obvious by now? It is more than obvious to other countries, just not to portions of the US.