In a span of just a few months, two major federal funding decisions have ignited fierce debate and left vulnerable Americans in the lurch. The Trump administration’s abrupt cancellation of key grant programs—one aimed at closing the digital divide, the other at advancing life-saving medical technology for children—has drawn lawsuits, heartbreak, and urgent questions about the true cost of policy battles far from the public eye.
On October 7, 2025, the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against President Donald Trump and senior Commerce Department officials, as reported by Reuters. The group alleges that the administration’s decision to scrap the Digital Equity Act’s competitive grant program in May was not only unlawful, but also a direct blow to Congress’s intent to bridge America’s digital divide.
"NDIA brings this lawsuit to stop these flagrant constitutional violations that severely undermine Congress’s efforts and intent to close the digital divide in an age where internet access is a critical necessity," the group wrote in its complaint. The Digital Equity Act, funded by Congress, was designed to expand digital literacy and skills across the country—a mission that advocates say is more urgent than ever as internet access becomes essential for everything from education to health care and job opportunities.
But the controversy doesn’t stop at broadband. In April, the Trump administration ordered the cancellation of a $6 million, multiyear Department of Defense grant supporting the development of the PediaFlow, an implantable artificial heart for infants and small children. The grant, led by biomedical engineer James Antaki at Cornell University, was just months away from launching clinical trials, according to NPR. The move was part of a sweeping action that cut about $10 billion in federal grants to elite colleges and universities, a response to what the administration called civil rights violations and failures to counter antisemitism on campus.
For families like the Stricklands, the fallout is personal and immediate. Caleb Strickland, a four-year-old boy with a congenital heart defect, has been living in the hospital since May, tethered to an external ventricular assist device (VAD) after a virus worsened his already fragile heart. His mother, Nora, says the dispute in Washington feels worlds away from her son’s hospital room at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. Yet the consequences are all too real.
Caleb’s VAD, which he affectionately calls Henry, is a bulky, external device that keeps his heart pumping while he waits—possibly for a year or more—for a transplant. The power source is so large it’s nicknamed Taco Bell, and it can only be unplugged for thirty minutes at a time. Caleb can’t go home, can’t visit the playground, and can’t live the life of a typical child his age. "If her son could have a portable implant like the one that Antaki was working on, Caleb could go to the playground. He'd be home, and he'd be out and about. He wouldn't need to be plugged into a wall, and he wouldn't be tethered," Nora Strickland told NPR.
The PediaFlow device, about the size of a AA battery, was designed to change all that. Unlike the current Berlin Heart device—an external pump used for most babies and toddlers with heart failure in the U.S.—the PediaFlow would be fully implantable, freeing children from the burdens of external machinery. The Food and Drug Administration has even identified pediatric ventricular devices as an area of critical medical device need.
Yet, as Antaki explained, the grant’s abrupt cancellation has left his lab shuttered, graduate students gone, and his key technician laid off. "We feel like collateral damage," Antaki said. "There is no reason to punish us. We're trying to do good in the world." He received a stop-work order in April, with a grant officer at the Department of Defense stating simply that the action was "at the direction of the Administration." Follow-up inquiries yielded little more: "These actions have been directed to us by the administration."
The ripple effects extend beyond the lab. Since the news broke, Antaki has fielded dozens of calls from families desperate for the PediaFlow device—some hoping for a lifeline for their children, others mourning what might have been. Ned Place, a fellow Cornell professor, lost his daughter Ingrid to hypoplastic left heart syndrome just a day after her birth. "The PediaFlow would have bought my family more time," Place said. "While it's too late to help Ingrid, I'm thinking about other families in the future." Each year, he marks Ingrid’s birthday on his calendar, a quiet reminder of the stakes behind every research grant.
Doctors on the front lines share the sense of urgency. Dr. Jonathan Edelson, medical director of the Heart Function, Transplant, and Ventricular Assist Device Program at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told NPR, "This deserves our attention, this deserves our resources, this deserves people working together. We know that those tiny patients need devices that are smaller and better compatible with their bodies." Edelson’s hospital is participating in a clinical trial of a smaller, more portable VAD, but Caleb wasn’t eligible. "Kids can't go home on it, which is, you know, even harder than the limitations in mobility," Edelson said. "It's something that I hope will not be a forever thing."
Meanwhile, the broader implications of the Trump administration’s funding decisions are being tested in court and debated in public. The NDIA lawsuit argues that ending the Digital Equity Act’s competitive grant program was not only unconstitutional but also a betrayal of Congress’s explicit intent. Advocates warn that halting digital literacy programs now could widen existing inequalities, leaving rural and low-income Americans further behind in a world increasingly dependent on technology.
The administration, for its part, has defended its actions as necessary to address what it sees as institutional failures—whether on college campuses or within federal grantmaking. Yet critics say the collateral damage is mounting, with innovation stalling and the most vulnerable paying the price. As Antaki put it, "I'm becoming increasingly demoralized, as you can imagine, because I don't see any way out of this predicament unless this funding is unfrozen." He holds out hope that Cornell might reach a deal to restore the grant, as some other universities have, but for now, the future of his research—and the children who might benefit from it—remains in limbo.
As these disputes play out in courtrooms and administrative offices, families like the Stricklands are left waiting, their lives shaped by decisions over which they have no control. The stakes, measured in missed opportunities and lost time, are a reminder that policy debates rarely unfold in a vacuum—they land, sometimes with devastating impact, in the most unexpected places.
