Thoughtcrime at a Diabetes Conference

When Institutions Choose Compliance Over Members

In June 2026, Steven Kahn, the editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care (published by the American Diabetes Association) was removed from an American Diabetes Association conference by the police (among other attending researchers) for disseminating printed copies of article criticizing the Trump administration’s changes to scientific research… an editorial published in Diabetes Care. By Kahn. The editor-in-chief of Diabetes Care. An American Diabetes Association (ADA) journal.

The other researchers removed were former ADA president Desmond Schatz, Aaron Kelly (University of Minnesota), Justin Ryder (Northwestern University), and Irl Hirsch (University of Washington).

I have spent a lot of time recently looking at how institutions react when they feel politically threatened. The patterns are… consistent.

The ADA’s response here is an lesson in exactly what not to do when your organization is caught between its members’ values and external political pressure. This type of self-inflicted communications catastrophe is driven by an illusion that you can suppress a narrative by forcefully removing the people sharing it. I’m sure you’re familiar with the Streisand Effect, where you make something more widely known in the process of trying to suppress it. This is a good example of that: if the ADA hadn’t kicked its members out of a conference for sharing an editorial it published, that editorial wouldn’t have made it to The New York Times, Washington Post, MedPage Today etc.

What, exactly, did the ADA shut down?

The Diabetes Care editorial the researchers were handing out is titled “Misguided Brushes of a Pen Continue to Dismantle and Destroy Biomedical Research in the United States: We Can No Longer Afford Complacency and Fear. We Must All Act Now!”

It is a crisis-oriented piece of advocacy communications in which authors Kahn, Cheryl A.M. Anderson, John B. Buse, and Elizabeth Selvin deliberately break with the conventions of detached academic writing. This type of communication happens when the cost of inaction seems so high that it overrides our preference for maintaining the status quo.

The authors argue that the Trump administration’s policies (specifically, a proposed $5 billion reduction to the NIH budget, a 66% drop in grant awards, and an 89% reduction in Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs) in the first 13 months of the administration represent an existential threat to biomedical research, and that this issue is one of national survival.

The language they use is interesting from a strategic perspective. They talk about radical modifications, haphazard reductions in force, and the spiraling fall of American healthcare innovation, explicitly calling on scientists, clinicians, and citizens to contact their congressional representatives and demand that these ‘destructive processes’ stop. They quote Francis Collins, former NIH Director:

“Mix politics and science, you get politics. You kind of lose everything else.”_{—Francis Collins}

The editorial is, essentially, political mobilization in a scientific journal. The authors effectively leverage their credibility to legitimize a partisan activist message that speaks directly to the audience of Diabetes Care (and attendees at an ADA conference). Anyone in the field understands the message.

When your message reaches a different audience

The underlying message and data in Kahn et al.’s editorial isn’t wrong, and it also effectively communicates the goal to the journal’s readership. What it doesn’t do is speak to the policymakers who are actually making the decisions or the people who support the decisions the policymakers have made. Outside of the Diabetes Care/ADA conference/academic audience, a partisan and advocacy-oriented message that doesn’t engage with the administration's stated rationale for the budget cuts or acknowledge any legitimate policy arguments for restructuring NIH funding or advisory structures somewhat hands critics an easy basis for dismissal: that the scientific framing is a cover for political activism. The title alone indicates that it is a ‘call to arms’. Entirely consistent with the advocacy genre… BUT, it means the editorial is somewhat preaching to the converted rather than attempting to convert anyone else. Because, to use the same quote as Kahn et al., “Mix politics and science, you get politics. You kind of lose everything else.”

I’m not intending to criticize the authors of the editorial here, or their decision to publish it. The situation is substantial enough to warrant this type of activist response. I’m sharing this as an example of what the communication choices and trade-offs can result in when responding to situations like this, because the issue being highlighted and the way it was done provides important context for an unfortunately common situation in scientific research and research-related organizations under the current administration.

Institutional panic

The ADA’s position here is genuinely difficult. I want to immediately criticize their response to Kahn and his colleagues passing that editorial out and call it a ridiculous display of ill-intentioned power and censorship. Because it is. But it’s also not. And the ‘not’ part needs to be covered before I get into the actual criticism (don’t worry, I don’t agree with what they did).

The reality of a situation that results in a group of researchers publishing a partisan activist editorial in a scientific journal is that it is an entirely unprecedented situation that organizations just aren’t equipped to handle effectively (yet). Nobody has a playbook for what to do when the government tries to destroy scientific research while simultaneously relying on the government to continue providing them with funding for said scientific research. What I’ve observed over the past year in working with individuals from multiple research-associated organizations in the US is that this situation is pushing organizations to act in ways that go against their own values and alienate their own primary stakeholders in an attempt to avoid, for want of a better phrase, pissing off the government.

These organizations rely on constructive relationships with federal agencies for funding, data access, policy influence etc. while also representing the communities whose work is being threatened by the agencies’ decisions, and when there’s hostility from the government, it’s almost impossible to align with the community without risking agency relationships or protect those relationships while maintaining credibility with your community. (This type of division is, possibly, if I’m being extra cynical, a point of the administration’s current approach rather than just an unfortunate side-effect of it).

The Diabetes Care article itself begins with a disclaimer from the ADA:

“The opinions expressed in this editorial are the personal views of the authors (S.E. Kahn, C.A.M. Anderson, J.B. Buse, and E. Selvin) and do not represent those of the American Diabetes Association or the authors’ employers. The American Diabetes Association had no role in the development or writing of this manuscript.”

Standard institutional self-protection (“Please don’t look at us, we just publish the journal”), but also slightly awkward, given that the journal’s own editor-in-chief is the lead author. It’s defensible, though, and is the kind of distancing organizations do all the time.

The researchers handing out the editorial at the conference changed things for the ADA because they were handing it out right where current NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya was scheduled to give a keynote speech (he pulled out last-minute and a senior NIH adviser spoke in his place). If you’re an ADA administrator, you are looking at a nightmare scenario there. Prominent members of your organization staging a visible protest against the head of the federal agency that funds your field, at your own flagship event, immediately before that official is due to speak.

So the decision the ADA made, instead of being calculated or particularly thought out, was quick choice in response to what seemed like a massive (and unexpected) risk.

The wrong decision

As I mentioned above, I don’t think the ADA made the right choice here. I just understand why they made it.

From a crisis communications perspective, the ADA’s response failed on almost every level. The first being that they thought they could control a narrative through physical force. This mistake always backfires for the same reason: suppression is not resolution. As we can see by the fact that this event is all over the news, the ADA suppressed nothing and amplified the issue instead. Before the conference, this was a strongly worded editorial read by people who subscribe to Diabetes Care. Now, it’s got headlines in major mainstream media outlets and is being discussed all over the socials.

If you want to take a localized situation and turn it into a national story about censorship, this is how you do it.

MedPage Today’s Facebook Page has video footage of Aaron Kelly, University of Minnesota Professor, being physically shoved by an officer and security physically ripping the printed editorials out of Steven Kahn’s hands. The researchers were told they would be arrested for trespassing if they re-entered the building, and their conference lanyards were confiscated.

The visuals of the ADA’s response, all the intimidation, is memorable. Sending uniformed police officers to physically shove respected doctors and rip papers out of the hands of one of your own journal editors is difficult to walk back on. It’s almost impossible for a scientific organization to defend using state police to silence scientific discourse in any forum where your audience is the scientific community. Or even the general public.

When people think “ADA conference” and the first image that comes to mind is one of a former ADA president being escorted out of his own organization’s conference… that’s an image of an institution that prioritizes political deference over its own members, and it is now attached to the ADA’s brand.

According to the ADA’s media team, the five researchers were removed by onsite event security because they were “violating the conference code of conduct, which they agreed to during the registration process.” The code prohibits “disorderly or disruptive conduct such as protesting”. This phrasing is vague enough that it can be interpreted however it needs to be in the moment. And the ADA’s use of it is insulting to the intelligence of its audience.

Handing out copies of a peer-reviewed article that the ADA itself had published being classified as “disorderly or disruptive conduct” requires a level of cognitive dissonance that nobody outside the ADA’s administrative offices is going to accept as anything but an excuse to cover the real issue: the ADA was terrified of the political optics of the situation.

Using a vague policy to justify a heavy-handed action doesn’t work. The public sees through that, and the organization loses credibility. The ADA now looks like an organization that will use its own rules as a weapon against its own members when it becomes politically convenient to do so.

This sort of thing kills trust. It’s one thing for an institution to disagree with its members and another entirely to weaponize administrative bureaucracy to silence them. A code of conduct should be for community safety, but these codes are becoming a mechanism for institutional control when organizations are acting from a place of self-preservation (even if forced by atypical political pressure). I’ve seen this happen in real-time across higher education over the past year. And when the community realizes the rules are being used against them, that breaks the psychological contract between the institution and the community. Irreparably.

The lesson here is do not prioritize the appearance of compliance over your impact on your key stakeholders.

Speaking of stakeholders, the ADA prioritized the wrong ones. This type of mistake underlies a lot of catastrophic comms failures. ADA leadership clearly prioritized their relationship with federal agencies and policymakers over their relationship with their own members, perhaps believing that angering the Trump administration was a greater risk than angering the scientific community. But the scientific community is the primary stakeholder. The ADA didn’t think through the second, third, fourth-order consequences. They stopped here:

First-order thinking: If we remove the researchers, the NIH officials won't be confronted with a protest at our conference.

What they should have done is look at the ‘what’s next’ of it all:

Second-order thinking: And then the researchers will be furious and speak to the press.

Third-order thinking: And then the press will have video footage of police shoving doctors, and the story will be “ADA silences scientists” rather than “ADA conference features NIH director.”

Fourth-order thinking: And then the ADA will have spent enormous political capital to protect a relationship with an administration that may not even appreciate the gesture, while permanently damaging its credibility with its own members.

The scientific community already feels politically targeted, which is precisely why the Kahn et al. editorial resonated. Sending the police after the authors signals to the entire ADA membership that the institution will not protect them when things get politically difficult and “Your concerns are a liability to us”.

I suspect that the decision-makers here completely misunderstood how the media and the broader public would interpret the event. They handed journalists the perfect narrative of “courageous scientists speaking truth targeted by institution enforcing hostile government objectives”. That narrative writes itself. The story is now about the ADA, not the NIH, the administration doesn’t actually need to respond to the editorial because ADA has done the work of discrediting it for them.

A better approach

The moment the researchers started handing out the editorial, the ADA needed to take a moment and assess the actual threat, not the perceived threat.

Doing nothing would have been the most effective response. Let the researchers hand out the editorial. Yes, it would have been awkward. Yes, the NIH officials might have been annoyed. But it would have remained a minor, localized incident. Allowing it would have let the ADA demonstrate a commitment to free expression and academic debate, even when it’s uncomfortable. That is a reputationally positive position to be in. The ADA’s attempt to protect its political relationships has almost done more damage to those relationships than the original protest would have.

If the ADA truly felt the activity was disrupting the conference, they could have sent a senior leader to speak with the researchers and engaged with them to acknowledge the concerns, perhaps asking them to move to a designated area, treating the researchers as members with legitimate grievances rather than threats to be neutralized. And if the ADA felt the need to address the situation publicly, they could have issued a statement reaffirming their commitment to scientific debate while clarifying conference policies without resorting to physical removal. Something boring, bureaucratic, and entirely uninteresting to journalists. That’s exactly what the ADA ‘should’ have wanted.

What’s next?

For the researchers:

The researchers have a massive platform. If I were working with them, I’d advise them to amplify their core message about research funding while maintaining a data-driven, professional focus, rather than getting drawn into a prolonged public dispute with the ADA. The temptation to use the incident as the story will be strong, but it’s a distraction from the substantive argument about NIH funding. I’d use one single truth in the approach:

Keep the attention on the data, not the drama.

Choose your platforms and battles strategically. Issue a single, unified public statement acknowledging the incident, then get back into the core issue of the impact of the proposed NIH budget cuts etc. on biomedical research. Use every media inquiry to talk about the data. If a journalist asks about being escorted out by police, say: "That was unfortunate, but what is truly alarming is the 66% drop in grant awards that threatens the future of diabetes care."

For the ADA:

The ADA, I’d advise to release an immediate and fully transparent apology for the use of police force to begin rebuilding trust, accompanied with a promise to review the enforcement of that code of conduct in the context of protecting peaceful scientific advocacy. And state that they will allow these researchers admission to future conferences and that they will be able to present their work. Ask the question: What does the ADA have to lose by standing with these researchers?

That’s what the board wants to know, isn’t it? The ADA’s fear is presumably that siding with researchers who publicly criticized the Trump administration will damage its relationship with federal agencies (specifically, the NIH) and jeopardize access to funding, along with data partnerships and the ability to influence policy. That fear, while rational, is based in the flawed assumption that the administration wasn’t already going to view the ADA as a hostile actor the moment that editorial appeared in Diabetes Care with the ADA’s own editor-in-chief as lead author. The ADA’s name was already on the piece. The distancing disclaimer in the journal’s pages doesn’t change that. The political damage, if it exists, was already done before the editorial was printed and handed out at the conference.

The decision-makers should understand that the risk calculus they ran in the moment was backwards and that the path they chose to protect the institution is the one that is damaging it most. It’s not too late to redirect, though there are new self-inflicted challenges to overcome now in terms of audience trust.

For scientific institutions:

Beyond the immediate response, this incident raises a broader question that every scientific organization needs to be asking right now:

What is our position when our members’ values and our institutional interests conflict?

That conflict is going to intensify. The pressure on scientific organizations to stay neutral and protect their access to political power under the current administration is unprecedented and massive, and scientific organizations need to be aware that the cost of silence and neutrality is suppression of their own community.

For the broader community:

And for the community… The ADA’s response is a warning. An institution’s primary instinct will almost always be self-preservation. They will frame you as a risk. They will build a narrative to justify your removal, and they will use administrative policies as a weapon. The crisis is the institution’s, but the effects will be shifted onto you.

If you’re working at a place that is starting to feel politically hunted, learn to recognize the warning signs that your institution is preparing to throw you under the bus. Listen closely to how leadership talks. Whenever the internal conversation moves from “how do we support our community’s work” to sudden emphasis on policy enforcement, code of conduct compliance, maintaining neutrality, aligning with the administration’s objectives, that’s your warning sign.

Watch for vague administrative language being used to define acceptable behavior, or sudden distancing from previously supported initiatives. Policies and procedures being brought in that go against everything the institution has previously supported or create new barriers and hoops to jump through to just… do your job. (Post-tenure review, I’m looking at you). These are indicators that an institution is prioritizing its external political relationships over its internal obligations. When you see these signs, they’re an indication that you might be viewed as a potential liability.

You need to be prepared to shape your own narrative, because the institution is not going to do it for you.

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If you found this useful, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments! And if you’re dealing with a crisis communications situation of your own, whether as an individual or an organization, feel free to get in touch.

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Sources

Kahn SE, Anderson CAM, Buse JB, Selvin E. Misguided Brushes of a Pen Continue to Dismantle and Destroy Biomedical Research in the United States: We Can No Longer Afford Complacency and Fear. We Must All Act Now!. Diabetes Care. 2026;49(6):901-905. doi:10.2337/dci26-0068

Police remove researchers from diabetes conference. Inside Higher Ed. Published June 8, 2026. Accessed June 8, 2026. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/06/08/police-remove-diabetes-researchers-conference

Johnson CY. Diabetes researchers ejected from conference after criticizing White House. Washington Post. June 5, 2026. Accessed June 8, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2026/06/05/diabetes-researchers-ousted-conference-after-criticizing-trump/

Police remove diabetes experts from conference for distributing critique of Trump administration. New York Times. June 5, 2026. Accessed June 8, 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/05/well/ada-conference-diabetes-trump.html