Six hundred mostly Black seniors in Pittsburgh sat through cognitive tests, wore sleep monitors, answered deeply personal questions about their childhoods and their trauma — and were promised answers. The Trump administration cancelled their study with 90 days notice, and now those answers aren't coming. This is what 'retribution' looks like when it wears a lab coat.
A Man Who Trusted Science — Then Got Burned By Politics
Roderick Blair spent decades not trusting researchers. He had reasons. As a 70-year-old Black man from Homewood, one of Pittsburgh's lower-income neighborhoods, he knew the history — studies that extracted data from Black communities and gave nothing back, research designed to tick a diversity box, not deliver results. "I know about the stubbornness of some researchers where Black people were just a throw-aside," Blair told The Guardian. "I choose not to participate in that foolishness."
But the Phresh study's researchers showed up. They stayed. For more than a decade, Blair wore a fitness tracker, answered surveys about childhood trauma, education and sexual abuse, and eventually — after a "delightful" young proctor changed his mind — took cognitive tests designed to detect early Alzheimer's. He took that test twice. The second test was supposed to capture changes over time. The results were supposed to come back to him.
They aren't coming. The Trump administration terminated the grant funding the Phresh study earlier this year, giving researchers 90 days to shut everything down — five months earlier than expected, a full year earlier than planned. Blair's cognitive test results, and those of roughly 600 other participants, will almost certainly never be formally interpreted or shared.
What the Phresh Study Actually Was
The Pittsburgh Hill/Homewood Research on Eating, Shopping and Health — Phresh — started in the Obama administration as a study on food deserts. Two predominantly Black, low-income Pittsburgh neighborhoods, the Hill District and Homewood, were both lacking a nearby grocery store. The Hill District was getting one. Homewood was not. Researchers used that as a natural experiment, randomly selecting addresses in each neighborhood to track health outcomes.
Over 15 years, as The Guardian reports, the study evolved into something far richer: a detailed record of how neighborhood conditions, discrimination, trauma and economic disinvestment shaped the long-term health of aging Black Americans. By the end, it was capturing cognitive health data at a time when researchers were actively reframing why Black Americans carry nearly double the Alzheimer's risk of white Americans — not as an individual genetic quirk, but as a measurable consequence of systemic forces.
Tamara Dubowitz, a professor and chair of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh and one of the study's primary investigators, described the core promise that's now been broken. "The real loss is that we promised our participants information and feedback based on their two cognitive tests or assessments that they did," she told The Guardian. The team had the data. They had the participants. What they no longer have, because they can't pay them, are the neuropsychologist and geriatric psychiatrist needed to formally interpret the results.
The 'DEI' Label That Kills Medical Research
The Trump administration has cancelled, frozen or otherwise disrupted more than 5,700 medical research grants at the National Institutes of Health, according to The Guardian. Studies like Phresh — which focused on Black communities, tracked health disparities, and examined how discrimination affects the body over time — have been specifically targeted under the administration's crusade against anything it can label "DEI."
Here is what that label is actually erasing. Of more than 12,000 brain-imaging studies on Alzheimer's, only about 700 report race at all, The Guardian reports, citing published research. Of those that do, more than 87 percent of participants are white — in a country that, per 2020 census data, is about 58 percent white. Clinical trials and research studies skew dramatically toward wealthy white participants. The Phresh study was one of the rare long-term efforts to build a dataset that didn't. Now it's gone.
Black Americans face nearly double the risk of developing Alzheimer's dementia compared to white Americans, according to the Alzheimer's Association. Nearly 7 million people in the US currently live with the disease. Treatments depend heavily on early diagnosis. The Phresh study's cancellation doesn't just deny 600 people their personal results — it delays or forecloses the kind of research that could eventually save lives at scale.
Retribution on a Spreadsheet
Blair didn't mince words about what he thinks happened. "If you don't agree with me, you're going to go to the woodshed," he told The Guardian. Then he asked a question that didn't really need an answer: "What has this administration done that has not been a retribution?"
He called the cancellation "clear" retribution, and it's hard to argue with him. This was a study rooted in a community that had every reason to distrust science and chose, slowly and painstakingly, to engage with it anyway. Researchers built that trust over more than a decade. The federal government, with a line-item cut and a 90-day shutdown notice, dismantled it in an afternoon.
The study was first funded under Obama, which probably tells you everything you need to know about why it ended up on a termination list. Call something DEI, attach it to an administration your base hates, and you don't have to explain the science — or the cost of abandoning it.
The Dingo Take
Six hundred people showed up. They showed up after decades of being burned by institutions that extracted from their communities and gave nothing back. They wore the monitors, answered the uncomfortable questions about abuse and trauma, took the cognitive tests they were promised would come back to them with answers. They trusted. That trust was the entire scientific achievement here, separate from any data point.
The Trump administration didn't cancel a grant. It cancelled a promise made to Black seniors in Pittsburgh who were already at elevated risk for Alzheimer's — a disease that kills slowly, whose treatments depend on catching it early, whose research base is already grotesquely skewed toward wealthy white participants. The researchers had the data. They just can't pay anyone to read it. Ninety days. That's what fifteen years of community trust is worth to this administration.
Somebody somewhere decided this study said the word "disparities" too many times and stamped DEI on it. That person will never sit across from Roderick Blair and explain why his cognitive test results aren't coming. Nobody in this administration will. They'll just move on to the next 5,700 grants and call it fiscal responsibility, and the people who needed those answers will keep waiting for results that are never going to arrive.
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