On June 5, the American Diabetes Association called security and the police on some of its own members. Officers forcibly removed five prominent diabetes researchers from the ADA’s 2026 Scientific Sessions for handing out copies of an editorial in its own flagship journal, Diabetes Care. The editorial warned that federal funding cuts and policy changes were threatening biomedical research, and it called on medical and scientific professionals to stand up to that pressure rather than “fret about political backlash.” Among those removed were a past ADA president and the journal’s editor-in-chief. All of those removed were banned from the remainder of the conference, even those who were scheduled to give presentations.
The incident occurred before a keynote address originally slated for Jay Bhattacharya, the NIH director appointed by the Trump administration. As head of the agency, he had directly overseen many of the grant terminations and funding cuts the editorial was warning about. Bhattacharya canceled at the last minute and was replaced by a senior adviser. After this incident, the ADA issued statements defending the police action based on organizational policy, its nonpartisanship, and the researchers’ conduct.
The ADA’s mission rests on four pillars: groundbreaking research, bold advocacy, trusted education, and meaningful connections. Yet by preventing distribution of an editorial published in its own journal about protecting those pillars from political pressure, and by banning researchers from the conference where they were expected to learn from colleagues and share new findings, the organization undermined each of those commitments.
The irony is hard to overstate. The ADA’s own conduct demonstrated the very behavior the editorial had called out. The ADA appears to have feared that tolerating visible criticism of the administration would invite retaliation in the form of withheld funding, the same federal money its members depend on to do the research the editorial was trying to protect. That left the ADA facing a real conundrum: betray its mission and values to protect the funding needed to carry them out, or defend them and risk losing those resources. The ADA chose the former. That is self-censorship.
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This is what political theorists call obeying in advance: an institution restricting its members because it anticipates what those in power want. Authoritarian governments don’t need to direct every medical association in the country. They only need enough institutions to censor themselves preemptively. Each time that calculation wins, it teaches every other institution watching that capitulation is the path of least resistance.
Other organizations have faced the same conundrum and chosen differently. The American Academy of Pediatrics didn’t soften its evidence-based vaccine recommendations or strip identity-based language from its equity programs to conform to the administration’s agenda, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) responded by terminating millions in grants funding its work. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists went further, voluntarily giving up federal funding that came with strings attached that would require it to compromise equitable, evidence-based care. The AAP sued HHS, and ACOG absorbed real financial damage rather than bend.
The editorial the ADA suppressed was not partisan. The integrity of science, independent from political pressure, is a baseline condition for serving medicine and patients, not a Democratic or Republican concern. Yet in defending the ouster of its members, the ADA cited its obligation to maintain a strictly nonpartisan environment. That defense is curious given its decision to invite a political appointee carrying out the agenda of the current administration to deliver the keynote.
Confidence in medicine is already strained by the government’s ideological approach to science, vaccine guidance, research funding, and public health messaging. Institutional efficacy depends on the trust of patients, researchers, clinicians, volunteers, and donors. That trust rests on the belief the organization will defend evidence and its own people, even when doing so carries risk. An association that bends reinforces the notion that medicine can be pressured into complicity with those in power who do not share the same values. Such capitulation emboldens those in power who hold the purse strings, and it weakens the institutions whose purpose is to enact democratic or humanitarian missions. Patients with diabetes depend on research the federal government is already threatening to defund, and they need an association willing to defend that research loudly.
Institutional erosion rarely occurs through a single act. Rather, it develops incrementally until repeated acquiescence produces a culture in which scientific independence, free speech, and dissent are preemptively constrained. The question is not whether institutions face pressure. It is whether they are willing to not internalize it. Because once institutions begin to obey in advance, they do not merely accommodate power. They help complete it.
When public service institutions sell out, there are real consequences, in this case for the patients, the researchers, and the democracy that depend on independent institutions willing to stand their ground.
Kim Bergner is a pediatrician.
