Trump administration puts medical journal article edited by Penn on hold
The move to halt the article’s publication added to the uncertainty creating concern in the medical and academic community at Penn and beyond.

A medical journal article stemming from a national symposium on research standards held at the University of Pennsylvania will not be published as planned, pending a review by President Donald Trump’s administration, its editors said Monday.
The article was written by staffers in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during the Biden administration, and Penn professors were involved in final edits. It was slated to publish in May in a special symposium issue of the Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics. It’s unclear whether the Trump administration will clear it for later publication.
The move to halt the article’s publication — previously reported by the news publication STAT — added to the uncertainty creating concern in the medical and academic community at Penn and beyond in the wake of Trump’s executive order to pause communications from federal health agencies, at least through Feb. 1.
The HHS press office did not respond to a request for comment.
Last week, The Inquirer reported the Rutgers University Center for Minority Serving Institutions had canceled a forthcoming conference indirectly funded through the U.S. Department of Labor. The cancellation was in response to Trump’s orders for federal agencies to cease diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
In an email to faculty last week, the interim executive vice president of Penn’s health system and dean of its medical school, Jonathan A. Epstein, also acknowledged the anxiety among researchers over the administration’s actions and said the university and its health system were working to understand and respond to any impact.
A speaker at the Penn symposium, Garret FitzGerald, the university’s director of the Institute for Translational Medicine and Therapeutics, acknowledged there has been precedent for new administrations to undo initiatives put in place under the prior one.
For example, when Joe Biden assumed the presidency in January 2021, he quickly rescinded some of Trump’s policies, issuing executive orders to rejoin the Paris accord on climate change and to end travel restrictions that targeted several mostly Muslim countries.
Still, FitzGerald said Trump’s freeze on the ability of government scientists and researchers to act with autonomy felt chilling.
“As a scientist, the appointment of political commissars to review scientific contributions from government scientists sends a chill up my back,” FitzGerald said. “But at this stage, we don’t know whether there’s going to be any political intrusion on what the original manuscript was.”
“It is reflective of the chaos that’s been caused by the broader freeze,” he said.
Article focused on integrity on scientific research
The article, coauthored by HHS Office of Research Integrity (ORI) director Sheila Garrity, was based on her presentation last October at a Penn symposium titled “Advancing Trust in Science: Institutional Obligations to Promote Research Integrity.”
Garrity spoke about new ORI regulations, which were finalized in September 2024, aimed at promoting scientific integrity in government-funded research.
“We hope that we will be able to include the article in a future issue of the journal, pending this new review,” Holly Fernandez Lynch, a coeditor of the symposium journal issue and an associate professor of law and medical ethics at Penn, said in an email Monday to The Inquirer. “However, it will almost certainly miss the time frame for inclusion with the other articles that are part of this special issue. And we have no guarantee it will ever be given the green light.”
Fernandez Lynch said she had thought the article had “already undergone all required government clearances.”
But on Jan. 21, she got a message from ORI’s communication director asking about the timeline for publication and indicating the article needed to be reviewed by Trump’s communications team to “ensure it aligns with HHS’ priorities moving forward.”
Fernandez Lynch then reached out to Garrity and her coauthors for clarification. She learned the article needed to be held as part of the new administration’s directive “that anything going out has to undergo review irrespective of what happened before inauguration.”
“We weren’t given further reasons or a timeline,” Fernandez Lynch said.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with examples of presidential actions rescinded by prior administrations.