In a striking collision between public health research and civil rights enforcement, a University of Maryland laboratory that studies some of the most vulnerable young people in America is now itself under scrutiny. The Lavender Lab, a research group funded by the National Institutes of Health, has received nearly $700,000 in additional federal money from the Trump administration this year. But that same federal support has now triggered a formal civil rights complaint, filed by the Equal Protection Project with the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights. The complaint alleges that the lab, which focuses on suicide, substance use, and other health outcomes among LGBTQ+ individuals and people of color, has been using race and ethnicity to decide who gets to participate in certain research-related opportunities. The heart of the issue, according to the complaint, is whether a federally funded program can legally prioritize non-White applicants in the name of studying marginalized communities. The answer, the group argues, is no—once you accept federal dollars, you cannot discriminate, even if your stated intentions are compassionate and research-driven.
The specific practices flagged in the complaint are both narrow and significant. The first involves the lab’s LGBTQ+ Teens of Color Advisory Board, a paid group of young advisers who help review research, give feedback, and take part in professional development activities. In its own recruitment materials, the lab made clear that it was “specifically looking for teens in the US who identify as both LGBTQ+ and Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) to join our board.” That language, the Equal Protection Project argues, is a straightforward admission that race and ethnicity are being used as gatekeeping criteria. The second concern centers on the lab’s research assistant program, which offers positions to undergraduate and master’s-level students. While these positions are largely unpaid, some students can receive academic credit or participate through federal work-study programs. The lab’s own postings say it “especially encourage[s] and invite[s] candidates from traditionally marginalized backgrounds” and that applicants with experience researching “LGBTQ and BIPOC communities” through “cultural humility, intersectionality, and social justice approaches” will receive the “strongest consideration.” To the Equal Protection Project, that language signals that race and ethnicity could play a decisive role in who is selected, which would violate federal anti-discrimination law if federal money is involved.
William Jacobson, the founder of the Equal Protection Project, framed the issue in direct and unsparing terms. He acknowledged that some people might wonder what is wrong with prioritizing non-White applicants in a program designed to study non-White populations. But his answer was firm: federal funding carries responsibilities, and discrimination in the administration of federally funded programs is unlawful, no matter who is being favored or why. “You do not need to have an advisory board, you do not need to hire research assistants based on race to fulfill the purposes of this grant,” he said. In other words, a lab can absolutely study health disparities affecting LGBTQ+ youth of color without making racial identity a condition of participation. The research itself can still be valuable, Jacobson suggested, but the way the lab organizes its own staffing and advisory structures cannot legally be built on the very categories that the research is meant to examine. The complaint asks the Department of Health and Human Services to investigate whether these practices run afoul of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin in any program receiving federal financial assistance, as well as the non-discrimination provisions of the Affordable Care Act.
The complaint also brings attention to the scale of federal investment in the Lavender Lab. The lab is led by researchers who study how intersecting aspects of identity—sexual minority status, race, ethnicity, and what the lab calls “structural oppression”—affect health outcomes, particularly among adolescents. One of the lab’s principal projects, a large research initiative running from May 2022 through April 2027, focuses on alcohol and drug use among sexual minority adolescents of color. According to NIH records cited in the complaint, the project has received approximately $3.6 million in total federal obligations and roughly $2.2 million in outlays at the time of filing. The same records show that the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism provided an additional $695,192 for the project for fiscal year 2026. That funding continues even as the Trump administration has made dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion programs across the federal government a top priority. This case, then, sits at a peculiar crossroads: a lab receiving money from an administration that has been aggressively hostile to DEI initiatives, while simultaneously being accused by a conservative civil rights group of racial discrimination in its own operations.
Jacobson and the Equal Protection Project are not asking for the lab to be shut down or for the research to be abandoned. Instead, they are asking for a closer examination of how the money is being used and whether the lab’s internal practices are consistent with the law. The complaint specifically questions whether federally funded research built on the framework of intersectionality is appropriate at all. Intersectionality, a term rooted in critical race theory, emphasizes how overlapping social identities such as race, gender, and sexual orientation combine to create unique experiences of privilege and oppression. The Lavender Lab openly embraces this framework, and its grant-funded research is deeply shaped by it. But Jacobson argues that when the focus becomes group identity rather than individual merit and individual circumstances, the line into civil rights violations becomes dangerously thin. He said the Equal Protection Project has identified hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding going to programs that incorporate intersectionality, and he called on the administration to issue a new executive order and agency guidance that would close the “intersectionality loophole” by explicitly including intersectionality in the ban on unlawful discriminatory DEI practices in federal grantmaking. His language was blunt: “Treating individuals as avatars of their demographic identity rather than as individuals with unique merits and circumstances undermines fairness, merit, social cohesion, and the rule of law.”
The broader context here matters as much as the details of this particular complaint. The Trump administration has launched investigations into DEI-related programs at universities across the country, including Arizona State University and New York University, with the Department of Justice leading the charge under Title VI. The Lavender Lab complaint is part of that larger wave, but it also raises deeper and more uncomfortable questions about how far organizations can go in tailoring opportunities to specific racial or ethnic groups while still accepting public money. Supporters of the lab would argue that research on marginalized populations requires input and participation from those populations, and that creating spaces specifically for LGBTQ+ youth of color is a way of ensuring the research is culturally grounded and ethically sound. Critics like Jacobson see it differently: to them, any use of race or ethnicity in selecting participants, employees, or advisers in a federally funded program is a violation of the law, regardless of whether the program’s goals are well-intentioned. Fox News Digital reached out to the University of Maryland, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the White House for comment, but none had responded at the time of publication. The case is likely to become a test of how far the current administration is willing to go in policing race-conscious programming inside federally funded research—and whether the very people that such research is designed to serve will end up being excluded from the very programs that claim to represent them.
