This episode of SouthBound is a little different. Sometimes I think of this podcast as like the feature section of a newspaper. Today’s story is more like front page news.
We’ve all seen the stories about the massive cuts in the federal government triggered by the Trump administration, and especially Elon Musk and his DOGE agency. Today we’re bringing you the story of one of those cuts. Our guest is Annelise Mennicke, the co-leader of a project at UNC Charlotte to find better counseling options for LGBTQ victims of sexual violence.
She and her team had won a $450,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health. Two faculty members and six students had already started the work. Then, on March 20, they got a letter from the NIH terminating the grant. The letter, among other things, made it clear that the grant was being canceled because the research involved gender identity.
Annelise talked to me about the difficulty of getting the federal grant — any federal grant — in the first place; the scientific rigor of the study; how much it hurt to lose the funding; and most of all, why it matters.
I hope this episode does a little to flesh out the impact of these cuts — not just on the people losing their jobs and the funding they need for their work, but for the rest of us who will never get a chance to benefit from what they could have done.
