The Trace reports on how White House directives and pledges to cut public health funding are already causing chaos and uncertainty.
'A direct attack on science': Trump's return is rattling gun violence researchers
Updated
In November 2024, as he awaited the fallout from the presidential election results, Dr. Garen Wintemute gathered a group of his colleagues at UC Davis to plan how they would download the thousands of files of federal gun violence data they rely on. Their actions would turn out to be one of the first of many steps taken by experts across the gun violence research landscape to ensure their decades-long efforts could continue after a new administration took office.
By December, Wintemute and hundreds of scholars had descended upon Seattle for the third annual National Research Conference for the Prevention of Firearm-Related Harms. While there, he presented his latest gun violence research—on political violence and protective orders—to a crowd of several hundred "young, smart, eyes open, motivated people," said Wintemute, who is also a physician. "And they have no idea what's about to happen because they haven't lived through it, but I have, and the federal funding is going to disappear."Â
For public health researchers and experts who have studied gun violence for years, uncertainty has coursed through decades of efforts to track and fund their scholarship, The Trace reports. Now, as the new administration takes aggressive steps to reverse progressive policies and allow pandemic funding to expire, uncertainty is once again the prevailing notion in their field.Â
Just one week into Donald Trump's second term as president, the White House has moved to withdraw the United States from the World Health Organization and passed a directive calling on public health agencies—including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—to pause external communications with the public and others. The administration also passed a directive that attempted to halt trillions of dollars in federal funding for programs across the country, a decision that was rescinded just one day later. That about-face—and attempts to stem the disruption caused by the initial directive—did little to ease the concerns of experts who fear the administration's attempts to grasp control of public institutions could smother their work in the immediate future.
"These actions are a direct attack on science—not just health, but science in general," said Joseph Richardson, an anthropologist and epidemiologist at the University of Maryland who has studied gun violence for more than 20 years. "You can slowly see the pendulum shifting back towards treating [gun violence] as a law enforcement problem."Â
For decades, researchers, physicians, and epidemiologists were stymied in their efforts to study gun violence as a public health issue, a link that was first made in the late 1970s. The CDC began funding gun violence research in the 1990s, as the rates of firearm homicide and suicide spiked, but lobbying by the National Rifle Association led to the 1996 Dickey Amendment, which effectively halted federal dollars for the research. It wasn't until 2019 that Congress struck a bipartisan deal jointly awarding the NIH and CDC an annual $25 million to study gun violence.Â
The significant increase in funding led to a more diverse pool of scholars, who addressed long-ignored regions and aspects of firearm prevention, establishing first-of-their-kind hospital-based violence intervention programs in the south and implementing effective suicide prevention strategies amid increasing rates. Federal agencies have spent more than $137 million in gun violence research since 2020, a Trace analysis found, compared to the nearly $25 million spent in the five years prior, or the $500,000 spent annually in the decade before that.Â
Those at the forefront of this work, who acknowledge that the 2019 funding was allocated during the first Trump term, said they are anxious about the future of their work, and the gun violence epidemic by extension. They point to the now-empty Office of Gun Violence Prevention in D.C., and cuts to the safety board created to prevent school shootings. As the new administration takes measures to impede the public institutions credited with measuring, funding, and sustaining medical and scientific progress, experts said public mistrust of critical scientific investments may lead to a lack of scrutiny on a myriad of health issues, including gun violence. Â
"The next four years are going to be a real struggle to figure out how we can regain the trust that we lost at some point," said Cassandra Crifasi, a researcher at Johns Hopkins who has been in the field for 15 years. "And I think many of us are a little bit perplexed still about how exactly we lost this trust, and the current [sort of] attack on science and the academy."
Despite the looming headwinds, Crifasi said she and her colleagues are committed to their work. Similarly, Wintemute remembers the last time gun violence research faced dire straits, in the 1990s and 2000s, when "there was no money at all for research." During that period, he used over a million dollars of his own money to continue to fund the research center at UC Davis. It is among the nation's first university-based violence prevention centers, and may be a model for the future of the field in this new reality, he said. "There are these external constraints on what you do, but that doesn't change your commitment."
Other veteran gun violence researchers share that sentiment. For Richardson, who leads gun violence research in Maryland, the process of continuing gun violence research will involve rallying around state initiatives, philanthropic efforts, and getting a lot done with little, as has been the case for the majority of his career.
"For me and others, the direction that we are going to need to take is to rely upon the state offices of gun violence prevention to set the tone in light of everything that is going on [at] the federal level," he said, noting organizations like the Black and Brown Research Collective, which is working to ensure researchers are supported and aware of how to navigate limited funding. "And we are preparing for it; every conversation is about how we move forward."Â
For many researchers, the preparation is also centered around harnessing public datasets, and checking in on each other as they brace for the uncertainty.Â
"We will continue to do everything that we can as researchers, particularly in our center, to get information out on what works," echoed Crifasi, who is based in Baltimore.
This story was produced by The Trace and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
Originally published on thetrace.org, part of the BLOX Digital Content Exchange.
