The US Health and Human Services has reversed course on an earlier decision to slash funding to the widely acclaimed Women’s Health Initiative, supported by the National Institutes of Health. An HHS spokesman Thursday said that the Trump Administration would restore the support to the widely-acclaimed initiative, which has been responsible for a range of landmark studies on women’s health in its 24 years of activity, including findings in 2002 that hormone replacement therapy is associated with a higher risk of breast cancer.   

“These studies represent critical contributions to our better understanding of women’s health,” said Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, in a media statement.

The news came in another tumultuous week of Trump Administration executive orders and decisions affecting the nation’s health research endeavors including: new guidelines banning NIH grants to research institutions with diversity and equity policies as well as a historic agreement with the food industry to remove synthetic, petroleum-based dyes from the U.S. food supply by the end of 2026.

Agreement to phase out artificial dyes framed as “voluntary”

The agreement on food dyes, announced Tuesday by the Department of Health and Human Services is the first significant move by new HHS Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to address an epidemic of obesity and chronic diseases in his “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) movement. 

During an HHS press conference, new US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Marty Makary said that HHS had reached an agreement with major food producers to remove about eight petroleum-based dyes voluntarily, saying, “I believe in love, and let’s start in a friendly way and see if we can do this without any statutory or regulatory changes.” 

However an HHS press release later said that the FDA would be “establishing a national standard and timeline” for the food industry to transition from petroleum to natural dye alternatives. 

It also stated that it would be “initiating the process to revoke [FDA] authorization for two synthetic food colorings—Citrus Red No. 2 and Orange B—within the coming months,”  while “working with industry to eliminate six remaining synthetic dyes, FD&C Green No. 3, FD&C Red No. 40, FD&C Yellow No. 5, FD&C Yellow No. 6, FD&C Blue No. 1, and FD&C Blue No. 2—from the food supply by the end of next year.

HHS also is asking food companies to remove FD&C Red No. 3, a recognized carcinogen, sooner than the 2027-2028 deadline previously set by the government.

Dyes are familiar to consumers in  Froot Loops ®  and other brand name foods 

Artificial dyes are used in brand name foods like M&Ms® chocolate, Kellog’s Froot Loops ® breakfast cereal, and Gatorade ® drinks. 

The HHS said that it would be authorizing four new natural color additives in the coming weeks, while also accelerating the review and approval of other natural dye alternatives, to expedite the transition. 

And it said that it would be partnering with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to conduct more comprehensive research on how food additives impact children’s health and development.

“For too long, some food producers have been feeding Americans petroleum-based chemicals without their knowledge or consent,” said Kennedy, in the HHS announcement.  “These poisonous compounds offer no nutritional benefit and pose real, measurable dangers to our children’s health and development. That era is coming to an end. We’re restoring gold-standard science, applying common sense, and beginning to earn back the public’s trust. And we’re doing it by working with industry to get these toxic dyes out of the foods our families eat every day.”

“We have a new epidemic of childhood diabetes, obesity, depression, and ADHD,” added Makary. “ADHD is not a genetic problem and our obesity epidemic is not a willpower problem, it’s something adults have done to children,” he said. 

Prior research has found links between childrens’ consumption of synthetic food dyes and behavioral problems, as well as links between some dyes and cancer in animals. In 2023, California became the first state in the US to ban four leading food additives, including carcinogenic red dye No.3.

Food experts said that the HHS ruling on food dyes was a positive step but doesn’t go far enough: 

“This is certainly a good thing for consumers and public health but it doesn’t address the underlying problem, which is the FDA’s system for regulating food chemicals is broken,”  Thomas Galligan, a food additives scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, told STAT News. “What we’d like to see the MAHA shift toward is addressing these systems-level failures.”

Women’s health initiative funding cuts left legacy research in jeopardy  

The initial announcement of the plans to dramatically reduce NIH funding for the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) was made on Monday, included a notice defunding 40 WHI regional centers as of September. The regional centers have been critical to the long-term research by WHI that has followed cohorts of women through decades.

However, on Thursday, HHS said that NIH had exceeded the Trump administration target for a 35% reduction in contract spending by federal agencies, and therefore WHI’s support to the regional centers as well as its headquarters at the Fred Hutchinson Center Center would continue at current levels.

“We are now working to fully restore funding to these essential research efforts,” said HHS spokesperson Nixon.

Since 1991, WHI has studied more than 161,000 women, following the health of thousands for years or even decades. Along with its findings on HRT and breast cancer, the WHI has  also found that calcium supplements don’t prevent fractures and low-fat diets don’t prevent breast or colorectal cancer.

“We are thrilled to learn about this news,” Jean Wactawski-Wende, told National Public Radio, after hearing about the reversal.  She leads one of the project’s regional centers that were slated to lose their funding.

Slashing the support would have affected older women, in particular, WHI said, noting that they are “one of the fastest-growing segments of our population.”  

NIH bans grants to research institutions with DEI policies 

The NIH funding cuts coincide with new guidelines banning the award of future NIH grants to researchers or research institutions that practice “diversity, equity and inclusion” (DEI) policies.  Institutions or grant recipients that have policies of diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) would also be barred from new grants and would face termination of existing grants, stated the new NIH directive, issued on Monday, 21 April.     

Researchers at institutions that boycott Israeli companies would also be barred from applying for grants, or obtaining grant extensions, the NIH directive issued on Monday stated. 

While the directive is targeted to “domestic institutions” academic centers abroad, and most notably in South Africa, have also reported on the termination of certain NIH grants – because they practice DEI policies, or address LGBTQ+ populations or other vulnerable groups.    

Health research in South Africa is facing an unprecedented crisis due to the termination of funding from the United States government,” reported the South Africa Medical Research Council, in mid-April. “Though exact figures are hard to pin down, indications are that more than half of the country’s research funding has in recent years been coming from the US.”

Confusion about new rules 

The new, nationwide NIH rules on grant awards also follow a series of recent Trump administration moves targeting half a dozen elite universities with freezes of billions of dollars in federal grants, including research support to dozens of vital health research initiatives. 

I saw firsthand the impact of stop-work-orders/terminations at USAID & now Harvard. My new @NewYorker piece is on the serious implications for the lives of millions across the world and the US – including for my own family and very possibly your own. 🧵
www.newyorker.com/news/the-led…

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— Atul Gawande (@agawande.bsky.social) April 22, 2025 at 5:01 PM

NIH had already been instructed to suspend awards to those elite schools that have had other federal funds frozen by the Trump administration, due to alleged anti-semitism on campus or their DEI policies, STAT news reported on 18 April, citing an internal email that originated with HHS. 

The schools named in the email were Columbia, Harvard, Brown, Northwestern, Cornell, and its affiliated medical school, Cornell-Weill Medicine. 

The evolving government, NIH and US Centers for Disease Control rules regarding DEI have been the focus of considerable confusion as US researchers have also reported problems with grant suspensions, payment delays and approval of manuscripts for publication due to their use of common terms like “female” or “sex” or references to “health equity” in their work. 

“I find it ironic that an administration that insists there are only two biological sexes seemingly wants us to pretend there are no differences between them,” observed John Quackenbush, chair of the Department of Biostatistics at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in a STAT news op-ed about how a series of recent research proposals he had initiated to study the relationships between sex and aging have been caught in a web of NIH dead-ends and delays.

Updated Friday, 25 April 2025 with news of the HHS reversal of its decision to slash funds to the Women’s  Health Initiative. 

Image Credits: Flickr/ShellyS, arthritiswa.org.au, wikipedia/Mars, WHI.