Lamba Legal, along with the law firms Crowell & Moring LLP and Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP, filed a lawsuit on May 20 against the National Institute of Health (NIH) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) for terminating over 100 legal grants that included funding for critical HIV research.

The lawsuit was filed in the District Court of Maryland on behalf of 16 researchers who have had their funding cancelled by the NIH under the Trump administration. Other plaintiffs include GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ+ Equality, a non-profit advocacy organization for LGBTQ+ people in the healthcare profession.

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I work at NIH. The fear among staff is palpable.
“It felt like all functions of our job had just been completely stripped away, like the system had been completely crippled.”

In their complaint, they claim that by eliminating these grants for LGBTQ+ health research, the administration violated the Administrative Procedures Act by relinquishing money that Congress had already approved. Moreover, they argue that the funding cuts violate the Constitution’s Due Process Clause by targeting research aimed at improving the lives of LGBTQ+ people.

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One of the plaintiffs, Dr. Carl Streed, said, “It is impossible to exaggerate the profoundly devastating impact these terminations have had on my research and those of my fellow plaintiffs.” Streed is an associate professor at Boston University Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine and the research lead for the Gender Care Center at Boston Medical Center. In March 2025, the NIH terminated two of his grants, in which he is a co-investigator, citing the studies’ connection to gender identity.

“These cuts guarantee the particularized health needs of LGBTQ people will go unstudied and unaddressed, terminate clinical trials midstream and severely impact the lives of participants in those trials, and decimate the careers of researchers like me, setting us back decades,” he continued.

According to Lambda Legal, these research grants are worth more than $800 million and are estimated to be less than 1% of the total NIH portfolio.

Omar Gonzalez-Pagan, senior counsel and health care strategist for Lambda Legal, said, “By decreeing that it will not fund research addressing the health needs of LGBTQI+ people, NIH has turned its back on our community and run afoul of its statutory mandates to fund research addressing health disparities of minority population as well as sexual and gender minorities.”

“The current administration’s actions communicate that transgender people’s health and the intersectional health needs of LGBTQI+ people are not worthy of consideration or study; this is not only morally wrong, it is unlawful. What’s more, NIH’s actions endanger the health and well-being of not just LGBTQI+ people but the public more broadly by depriving everyone of innovation and discovery that may arise within the context of this research. We will not allow this administration to return us to the dark days when our federal government ignored the health needs of LGBTQI+ people during the height of the AIDS crisis,”

GLMA Executive Director Alex Sheldon said, “The NIH’s mass termination of LGBTQ+ health research funding is more than a bureaucratic exercise—it’s a targeted attack on our communities.”

“It has dismantled entire research teams, forced early-career researchers out of the field, and left LGBTQ+ participants without the care or compensation they were promised. This decision sends a chilling message: that LGBTQ+ lives and health don’t matter. GLMA is fighting back because health equity demands evidence and because our community deserves to be understood, not erased.”

Litigation partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP, Justin Kingsolver, explains that his law firm is “proud to represent our courageous clients — who are some of the most accomplished medical researchers in this country — in their fight to protect equality, ensure due process, and preserve the rule of law.”

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