10/21/2025
October 2025 – Health Advocate Insights
October, 2025
Health Advocate Insights
The Health Advocate Insights is our monthly digital space, where we highlight a handful of key developments and share how all of us, whether we are students, healthcare providers, educators, administrators, or organizers, can promote health workforce diversity and social accountability in health professional training programs.
Our hope is that each issue gives you three things: a clearer sense of what is moving, a spark of energy from seeing how others are pressing forward, and at least one way you can plug in and act.
In this edition, you will find a round-up of the past month’s biggest policy updates, resources for deeper learning, and invitations to take action wherever you are, including registering for our second fall webinar on October 28th.
Shutdown Fallout: Families, Workers, and Students Left in Limbo
In our last newsletter, we covered Senate Democrats’ push to reverse healthcare cuts from H.R. 1 amid government budget negotiations. Several weeks and failed votes later, the United States is entering its 21st day of a government shutdown with no end in sight. Lawmakers remain locked in a standoff with Democrats continuing to fight for extending enhanced healthcare subsidies set to expire at year’s end. At the same time, Trump insists negotiations can’t begin until the government reopens. All the while, mass firings at the CDC have hollowed public health capacity, homebound seniors are losing access to telehealth services, new grants for students and researchers are stalled, and thousands of federal contract workers are going without pay.
Learn more and act:
- Listen: Tune in to KFF Health News’s podcast for a breakdown of the reasons behind the shutdown, and The Nation’s latest episode on the broader political stakes.
- Read: Get the facts on how community health centers will be impacted and how federal public health agencies continue to be stretched thin.
- Share: Amplify stories from furloughed workers and families facing missed paychecks and mounting uncertainty.
- Know: Recent polls show that 45% of voters are more likely to blame Republicans if there’s a shutdown, compared to 32% blaming Democrats.
Latest in Higher Education
The Trump adminsitration has hurled multiple attacks on universities including launching civil rights probes, freezing millions in federal research dollars (UCLA’s was recently restored), and terminating funding for Minority-Serving Instituions (MSIs). The administration’s latest attack comes in the form of a 10-point compact sent to nine universities that will give federal funding preference to those that uphold the administration’s higher education priorities including banning the use of race or sex in hiring and admissions, requiring students take standardized testing, and capping international undergrad enrollment. MIT has rejected the proposal as inconsistent with its core beliefs and California Governor Gavin Newsom has threatened to pull state funding for any California school that signs on.
Learn more and act:
- Watch: Watch the American’s Council of Education breakdown of the compact, how it is an acceleration of recent attacks, and why folks should care.
- Read: Read through Center for American’s Progress report on why this compact is unconstitutional and learn how campus leaders have mobilized against it.
- Share: Amplify stories from students who will lose access to critical academic support services.
- Explore: Learn how the US Commission on Civil Rights will investigate recent pressure campaigns on universities from the Trump administration and how the admistration has tried to assert control over the commission.
Image by freepik
Take Action Now
Curious about what you can do? Here are opportunities to take action from wherever you are.
Apply for Health in Partnership’s Power-building Partnerships for Health Cohort
“Power-building Partnerships for Health (PPH) is a 10-month cohort program that deepens relationships, trust, and structures for local health departments and community power-building organizations to take collective inside/outside action toward health equity and racial justice.” Apply by October 27, 2025.
Sign up for our upcoming webinar, No Margin No Mission: Sustaining the Safety Net, on October 28th
Join us for our second webinar of the semester, where we will discuss the economic impacts on safety net health systems, the human impacts on health care access, and different ways we can get involved to prevent these harms. Register here.
Join us for the fall relaunch of our For Us All Campaign on November 4th
Whether it’s your first time hearing about the campaign or you’ve been a part of this work since the beginning, we want you to be a part of this webinar! Join us 12-1pm (ET) on November 4 to learn more about the campaign, recent updates, and ways you can join the fight for transformative health justice through social accountability within health professions training institutions. Register here.
What We're Reading & Watching
- Workplace nondiscrimination protections: State solutions to the U.S. worker rights crisis (Source: Economic Policy Institute)
- Government Shutdown Gives Trump Yet Another Opportunity to Expand His Power (Source: Truthout)
- Nearly half of all federal funding for tribes at risk under Trump’s ‘big beautiful’ bill (Source: AP News)
- Judge orders Trump administration to restore more than $500M in UC research grants (Source: San Francisco Chronicle)
- Georgia’s Medicaid Work Requirement Program Spent Twice as Much on Administrative Costs as on Health Care, GAO Says (Source: ProPublica)
- When Should Federal Health Professionals Disobey Orders? (Source: HealthAffairs)
- Trans Patients File Groundbreaking Legal Complaint Against UPMC For Capitulation To Trump (Source: Erin in the Morning)
- After federal cuts, California schools could lose hundreds of mental health clinicians (Source: EdSource)
- Pissed-Off Doctors Aren’t Enough to Combat Trump’s Attacks on Public Health (Source: Truthout)
- Jimmy Kimmel’s reinstatement shows the power of noncooperation (Source: Waging Nonviolence)
- States counter RFK Jr.’s vaccine moves, but many people could be left without access (Source: Politico)
- Under Trump, the Department of Education has been bringing in activists hostile to public schools (Source: ProPublica)
- The Importance of Health Equity Scholarship in Uncertain Times (Source: JAMA Network Open
We transform health professions education by mobilizing and amplifying learners, teachers, community leaders, policymakers, and their organizations to advance equity in education, research, service, policy, and practice.
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