(The Daily Signal)—The Trump administration’s Health and Human Services Department has canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in grants dedicated to researching illegal sexual behavior in children, pregnancy prevention for “transgender boys,” and so-called sleep inequality affecting black sexual-minority men.
In March, HHS canceled at least $530 million of funding for LGBTQ+ health research programs, according to a grant tracker from Noam Ross of rOpenSci and Scott Delaney of Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
HHS previously provided more than $990 million of grant funding to LGBTQ+ health research programs, according to the tracker.
The National Institutes of Health’s newly sworn-in director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, said that under his tutelage, the agency would shift its priorities toward “research aimed at preventing, treating, and curing chronic conditions like cancer, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and many others that cause so much suffering and deaths among all Americans, LGBTQ individuals included.”
The shift “away from politicized DEI and gender ideology studies” is in “accordance with the president’s executive orders,” HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon told The Daily Signal.
The priority shift included cutting funding for studies focused on radical gender ideology, critical race theory, and other topics that polls show to be wildly unpopular with Americans, according to The Daily Signal’s review of terminated grants.
For instance, the Trump administration cut off $10,000 of promised funding to a conference Feb. 25-27 at the University of Oklahoma called “Be Curious Not Judgmental: The 4th National Symposium on Sexual Behavior of Youth.”
“Professionals and parents continue to use myths and misunderstandings as the base of decisions on problematic and illegal sexual behavior of children and adolescents,” the symposium’s website reads. “Adults worry about addressing sexual topics, and yet youth continue to be inundated with graphic sexual images and messages.”
“We need to better equip professionals and parents to understand and support healthy sexual development and to identify problematic sexual behavior early and intervene with all children and caregivers impacted,” the description continues.
One breakout session at the conference focused on “The Help-Wanted Prevention Intervention for Minor Attracted Individuals,” a euphemism for pedophiles.
On March 21, Trump’s NIH terminated a $2.9 million grant to the University of Minnesota for research on “adolescent health at the intersections of sexual, gender, racial/ethnic, immigrant identities and native language.”
The study aimed to determine “what positive and negative experiences are particularly relevant to the overlapping, simultaneous production of inequalities by [sexual and gender minority] identity, race/ethnicity, immigration experiences, and native language?”
The pre-Trump NIH promised the Research Triangle Institute $100,507 to study “social influences on sexual health among Latinx adolescents and emerging adults who identify as LGBTQ+ in an agricultural community.”
NIH ended a $1.5 million grant to Urban Health Partnerships for “leveraging a community-driven approach to address the impact of social determinants of health on structural inequities among Miami-Dade County’s intergenerational LGBTQ+ Community.”
Hunter College lost its $211,100 grant to study “development and feasibility of a psychosocial intervention for sexual and gender minority autistic adults.”
On March 18, NIH cut off Virginia Commonwealth University’s $205,308 grant focused on “using youth-engaged methods to develop and evaluate a measure for disordered eating behaviors in transgender and gender-diverse youth.”
“Transgender, nonbinary, and gender-diverse (TNG) youth face stigma due to the marginalization of their gender identities,” the study says. “TNG youth also have increased vulnerability to body dissatisfaction due to pubertal changes and development of secondary sexual characteristics that might be misaligned with their gender identity, which may be exacerbated by a youth’s inability to access gender-affirming medical care (i.e., puberty blockers, gender-affirming hormones).”
Yale University lost government funding for a program, “Training in Behavioral Design Interventions to Address Stigma Among Men Who have Sex with Men.”
“This study will explore relationships of different discrimination experiences and sexual health among young Black men who have sex with men (YBMSM),” the project narrative says. “This study aims to better the sexual health of YBMSM throughout their lives by informing future interventions that help decrease new cases of HIV and other poor sexual health outcomes.”
The NIH terminated its $2,368,492 contract with Brown University to study “improving mental health among the LGBTQ+ community impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.”
NIH had committed more than $1.3 million to Princeton University to study “Views of Gender in Adolescence.”
“Gender diverse children often experience disparities in mental health and well-being,” the project narrative says. “Further questions concern the stability of their gender, as that has implications for medical transitions. The proposed work would examine the role of gender beliefs and self-categorization in predicting mental health and well-being, as well as provide better estimates of rates of stability and change across time in the identities of both cisgender and gender-diverse youth.”
Trump’s HHS terminated a $1.3 million grant to the Center for Innovative Public Health Research to study “Adapting an LGB+ inclusive teen-pregnancy prevention program for transgender boys.”
The project’s goal was to change the title of “Girl2Girl,” a text messaging-based teen prevention pregnancy program, to “#TranscendentHealth, a gender-inclusive [teen prevention pregnancy program] for transgender boys.”
Other grants funded by the NIH before Trump took over included $2.5 million to a study on “Efficacy of a Multi-level School Intervention for LGBTQ Youth”; $6.4 million to “Multilevel strategies to understand and modify the role of structural and environmental context on HIV inequities for sexual and gender minorities of color”; and $1.8 million to “Sexual minority couples’ health during the transition to marriage.”
NIH canceled a grant of $1.3 million to examine “the Mechanisms and Consequences of Sleep Health Inequities Affecting Black Sexual Minority Men.”
“Using a syndemic and multilevel approach, this project seeks to investigate relationships between sleep and HIV treatment outcomes and behaviors (e.g., viral suppression and retention in care) among Black gay, bisexual and other sexual minority men (SMM),” the project narrative says, “a population in the United States heavily impacted by HIV/AIDS.”
The National Institutes of Health “remains fully committed to supporting research aimed at improving the health and well-being of every American, regardless of their sexual identity,” Nixon, the HHS spokesman, said.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
