Under the second Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services opened two new investigations this week involving race- and sex-based discrimination against medical students at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and Johns Hopkins University.
HHS’s Office for Civil Rights is investigating the two federally funded institutions for alleged violations of the Affordable Care Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act in response to complaints filed by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty (WILL). The federal department notified the Milwaukee-based conservative law firm of the civil rights probes in separate letters dated Monday.
Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine are both accused of running multiple diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that exclude white or male candidates because they’re not “underrepresented” or “diverse” enough. WILL argues these discriminatory programs have no place in medical education or the healthcare industry at large.
“There are a lot of people in need, and looking at their skin color to make determinations about what somebody deserves or needs is not the way that we need to be running medical education programs,” Cara Tolliver, associate counsel at WILL, told National Review.
Cincinnati Children’s runs a minority nursing scholarship that requires eligible applicants to belong to an “underrepresented group” in addition to other criteria. The annual scholarship is worth up to $2,750.
The hospital also provides a nine-week biomedical research internship that runs every summer with a select group of minorities, who must be from “underrepresented or disadvantaged backgrounds.” That includes blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and Pacific Islanders, while whites are left out.
“While candidates meeting the racial criteria can immediately qualify for [the Biomedical Research Internship for Minority Students], candidates who do not meet the program’s racial criteria must either find some other way than skin color to demonstrate their disadvantage, or lose their eligibility altogether,” the complaint, filed in December, states.
The other two discriminatory programs at Cincinnati Children’s are a minority medical imaging technology scholarship worth up to $10,000, the awards of which last up to two years, and an administrative fellowship program that encourages diverse groups to apply based on their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
Similar DEI programs were found at Johns Hopkins, including a plastic and reconstructive surgery visiting elective for fourth-year medical students “underrepresented in medicine” and a “diversity council” visiting clerkship for fourth-year medical students. This particular program is part of a larger network of diversity councils and offices that span the Baltimore-based medical school.
Additionally, WILL cites an orthopedic surgery diversity scholarship, a dermatology diversity clerkship award, and a DEI-infused visiting elective related to pediatric healthcare as examples of illegal race and sex discrimination.
These programs, Tolliver said, stem from a “broader mission” of the university to advance DEI across all its campuses. The complaint against Johns Hopkins was filed in January.
HHS opened a similar investigation into Cleveland Clinic in September during the final months of the Biden administration. WILL complained about the Ohio-based medical center’s Minority Stroke Program and Minority Men’s Health Center, both of which provide treatment, prevention, education, and other resources to racial and ethnic minorities suffering from strokes, diabetes, or other health conditions.
“They just need to be helping patients who are at a risk for stroke,” Tolliver told NR, “not looking at their skin color and saying, ‘We think you’re at a risk for stroke or not.'”
If they are found to have violated the Affordable Care Act and Title VI, each of the three medical institutions under investigation could lose significant federal funding from the National Institutes of Health, which HHS oversees.
WILL contends all Title VI actors, not just higher education institutions, are subject to the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling on race-based affirmative action.
In his first week back in office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order requiring federal agencies to enforce civil rights laws that prohibit recipients of federal funding from discriminating on the basis of race and sex. The stated goal of the directive was to end illegal discrimination and restore merit-based opportunities in the public and private sectors, including medicine.
In line with that order, HHS announced in a press release last Friday its civil rights office had opened investigations into four unnamed medical schools and hospitals — two of them presumably being Cincinnati Children’s and Johns Hopkins.
“Top-ranking organizations are supposed to be models and national leaders and caring for the country’s most vulnerable patients,” Tolliver said. “We’re in a situation where the health care system cannot continue to take care of patients effectively, safely, and efficiently when medical education and training programs are busy prioritizing irrelevant identity politics and futile goals to achieve race and gender balance.”
Given the healthcare staffing shortage crisis in America, the WILL lawyer noted it is important to recruit the “best and brightest candidates” by focusing on individual merit over race or sex.
“You don’t want to go into brain surgery with the most diverse provider. You want the best provider, and that provider can be of any race or sex,” she added. “These complaints are not about taking opportunities away from people. They’re about giving opportunities to people who need them in the case of patient care and deserve them in the case of education and training programs, and that applies to any person.”