Patients and students – as well as the providers and instructors they depend on – are suffering the consequences of the White House’s painful funding reductions and shameful political patronage. In a recently published op-ed, the executive committee of our AFT Connecticut-affiliated UCHC-AAUP (in collage, above) urged state lawmakers to shield residents from the escalating harm. They called for the resources needed to make up for Washington’s shortfalls and ensure their academic medical center’s mission to “promote equity and diversity and community health:”
We write today to express deep concern over the recent White House executive orders and federal legislation elevating political appointees’ influence in grants, cutting funds for critical research, and slashing Medicaid funds.
These actions threaten academic freedom, higher education, healthcare, and Connecticut’s economy. They are compounded by the $61.5 million cut to UConn Health (UCH) in the most recent state budget.
Our elected officials must take swift action to protect the public good by allocating the resources needed to shore up Connecticut’s only public medical academic center.
The new executive order replaces expert peer review with political oversight, jeopardizing expert scrutiny and credible science while dismissing dozens of National Institutes of Health (NIH) reviewers, thus replacing the integrity and autonomy of scientific merit as they navigate an ever-changing political agenda. Critical fields like health equity, vaccine studies, reproductive health, gender studies, and LGBTQ issues are being defunded, undermining research that serves our communities.
The repercussions are already being felt at UConn Health. In April, NIH cancelled $1.7 million in unspent UConn research grants, including mental health and LGBTQ+ projects. A proposed slash of indirect cost reimbursement to a flat 15% threatens $35 million annually. Infrastructure, administrative support, equipment and labs employing nearly 750 research positions, including graduate students, postdocs, and clinician-scientists, face immediate risk.
Federal legislation will cut or eliminate some Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax subsidies and reduce the number of eligible Medicaid/Medicare enrollees by as much as 20%, resulting in devastating losses for the University of Connecticut Health Center and our patients. Patients will lose access to primary care and rely more on costly emergency services – a devastating result for patient health and UCHC’s infrastructure. The anticipated direct loss from changes to Medicaid/Medicare to UCHC alone is $25 to $40 million. Additionally, this level of disenrollment jeopardizes UCHC’s 340B program eligibility, the loss of which could be between $49–$69 million.
The stakes extend well beyond our campus. In fiscal year 2024, NIH funding awarded $787 million to Connecticut institutions, impacting 6,831 jobs, and $1.78 billion in economic activity. These cuts endanger our research infrastructure and talent pool, pushing researchers to go elsewhere, hindering our ability to recruit top talent which can lead to a “brain drain.” The consequences include dampening state-generated innovation, threatening as many as 2,650 jobs in our state that depend on federal research funding tied to UConn and UCHC.
These federal measures erode and disregard academic freedom, disciplines that promote equity and diversity and community health.
In closing, we strongly and passionately urge our lawmakers to act now and convene a special session of the General Assembly to:
- Support UConn Health, the state’s only public hospital, as we step up to meet the growing demands of patients as more and more become uninsured; and
- Allocate funds to UConn and UCH to offset state and federal cuts, especially for essential but stigmatized research and patient care to the most vulnerable.
Editor’s note: the executive committee members are Ion Moraru, MD, PhD, President (top, left, in collage, above), Neena Qasba, MD, MPH, Vice President (top, second from left), Mark Maciejewski, PhD, Secretary-Treasurer (top, second from right), Michael Baldwin, MD (top, right), Alix Deymier, PhD, (bottom, left), Ruchir Trivedi, MD (bottom, second from left), Irina Bezsonova, PhD (bottom, second from right), and Laura Haynes, PhD (bottom, right).
