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national institutes of health
Trump Joins the War on Cancer... on the Side of Cancer
Nothing can compare to the scale and breadth of Trump 2.0’s across-the-board evisceration of every part of the government that helps with cancer prevention and treatment.
Apr 23, 2026
Last week marked one year of me being cancer free. I’ve shared parts of the story of my excruciating recovery on a couple occasions. Still, it’s been truly surreal to embark on this journey back to health while being inundated with report after report of Trump administration policies that seem intent on increasing the suffering caused by cancer. Where normal governments seek to protect people through research, medical innovation, and funding for early treatment and prevention, this administration has slashed research into cancer, cut funding for medical care, and moved to relax standards on how much exposure to carcinogens companies are allowed to inflict on surrounding communities. This is, in short, a pro-cancer government.
Every administration has been guilty of taking actions that jeopardized public health, but there is simply nothing that can compare to the scale and breadth of Trump 2.0’s across-the-board evisceration of every part of the government that helps with cancer prevention and treatment. For half a century, the United States waged a War on Cancer. Since January 2025, it has instead waged war on cancer’s victims.
Cutting Cancer Research
The most obvious part of the Trump administration’s war on cancer patients is the frontal assault on research seeking to develop new screenings, treatments, and, hopefully, cures for an array of cancers.
On January 21, 2025, his first full day back in office, President Donald Trump imposed a bevy of restrictions on the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including functionally freezing external communications, grant review, and employee travel. By executive fiat, Trump and his right hand man-domestic policy puppet master Russell Vought delayed the disbursement of the NIH’s $47 billion in research funds, including $7 billion under the aegis of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). This consequently forced a pause on the review and approval of new clinical oncology trials. At the end of his second week in office, Trump mandated an instant 15% cap on NIH grant overhead, effectively demanding that the agency spend $4 billion less than planned. After freezing funding until the start of February, the NIH then began ruthlessly, frequently illegally (according to multiple federal court decisions) terminating grants; more than 1,800 were ended between February and June. And while courts have restored many of the improperly terminated grants, there’s a lot less recourse for new grants that are not being issued, leaving many research labs across the country, “running on fumes,” as The Washington Post described it. According to the Post’s analysis, NIH grants this year have fallen by over 50%.
The current suits in the White House would like you to believe the idea of a moonshot to treat cancer and the usage of words like “woman” in scientific research is more controversial than the erosion of decades of medical research and mass defunding of investment in curing one of the most omnipresent diseases in human history.
From the start of this term, the administration has also censored the production and dissemination of federal health research from agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the NIH. This includes illegally scrubbing swathes of publicly available data and web resources and requiring approval from the administration for CDC scientists to publish in external journals. The CDC mandated that no research publication was to use a list of supposedly “DEI” terms, including “LGBTQ” and “biologically female.” In other instances, any inclusion of the word “race,” “gender,” “sex,” “pregnancy,” or even “woman” was grounds for censorship. The result has been a chilling of important investigations that impact how we treat cancer; the type of tumor I had (called a carcinoid) occurs most often in older women.
The CDC, though, would not let a researcher publish that last sentence, if it had its way.
On April 1 2025, four NIH institute directors and another acting director were placed on leave. By late April, the chaos of a rampaging DOGE and mass layoffs had already forced out at least 2,500 staff (more than 10% of the agency’s 20,000 headcount) including two dozen of the 320 in-house research physicians at the NIH Clinical Center. After some of the internal administration restrictions were eased, researchers were still dealing with massive backlogs for basic lab equipment. That May, the administration sent a stop work order to the SMART IRB system, an NIH-funded initiative that streamlined institutional review board approval for clinical trials used by more than 1,300 institutions. A career researcher at NIH told Science that “however bad everyone on the outside thinks it is, it is a million times worse.”
All in all, the NIH has seen a proposed 44% funding cut, with the NCI facing a 37% cut. And it isn’t just NIH; there have been major reductions in cancer research funding from the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs as well. A $1.5 billion Pentagon-directed health research grant fund, about half of which was devoted for cancer research, was slashed by 57%; funding for kidney, pancreatic, and lung cancer were zeroed out. At the VA, DOGE deployed an inaccurate data tool that terminated numerous grants, including one gene sequencing device that was being used to research cancer treatments.
According to STAT, the term “Cancer Moonshot” is now considered “controversial” at NIH, presumably because it was a Biden initiative. It’s difficult to imagine a more appropriate encapsulation of our ongoing reality: The current suits in the White House would like you to believe the idea of a moonshot to treat cancer and the usage of words like “woman” in scientific research is more controversial than the erosion of decades of medical research and mass defunding of investment in curing one of the most omnipresent diseases in human history.
Cuts, Not Cures
The war on cancer patients extends far beyond the scientific agencies. A number of agencies are also rolling back environmental and workplace safety regulations that protect us from cancer.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) alone is rolling back limits on a range of carcinogens including formaldehyde, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions (which include formaldehyde, nitrogen oxide, arsenic, sulfur, and other carcinogenic compounds), asbestos, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (also called PFAS or forever chemicals), and vinyl chloride. In a triumphant press release, the Trump EPA celebrated its moves to deregulate a host of chemicals, including dangerous air particulate (called PM 2.5), coal ash, and oil and gas wastewater, all of which are carcinogenic. The EPA also recertified Monsanto’s weedkiller Dicamba, which has been linked to higher risk of liver cancer and leukemia (and also banned twice by federal courts already). One of the chemical industry alums tapped to lead the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, Nancy Beck, is known for pushing for the rollback of bans on carcinogenic solvents. To top it all off, the agency is also down 25% of its staff, so it would be poorly positioned to enforce what standards survive the regulation purge.
Elsewhere, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has decimated the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), terminating 85% of its workforce. NIOSH conducted research on how exposure to dangerous chemicals impacted workers’ health, including studying cancer risk among miners and firefighters. The database tracking cancer in firefighters ended enrollment. NIOSH was instrumental in identifying now iconic toxic substances, including carcinogens like asbestos and ethylene oxide, and helping to develop federal workplace safety rules based on those findings.
Even students are being readily placed in harm’s way; the administration’s attack on clean energy programs has blocked school districts’ efforts to replace their diesel buses, and their cancer-causing exhaust, with electric ones. The Department of Interior has announced its intent to bring back the glory days of coal mining, despite coal exhaust spewing toxic air pollutants. To this end, the administration is exempting coal-fired power plants from upgraded air quality regulations. The administration has exempted around 100 industrial sites from Biden-era regulation of cancer-causing air pollutants.
Cartoonish Cruelty
Those are just two fronts in the federal government’s deeply disturbing war on cancer victims. Some 2 million Americans get cancer every year, with more than 600,000 dying from the disease. Thousands upon thousands more will be driven into both of those camps, from all of the policies I’ve mentioned and many, many more. Cuts to the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Food and Drug Administration’s Food Inspection Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs an air quality evaluation program that helps to apprise Americans of how safe it is to be outdoors for extended periods, leave all of us more in danger of facing cancer. Medicaid and Medicare cuts, the gutting of consumer protection bodies, and the revolving door with Big Pharma mean that we’ll pay more if we do.
Against this backdrop, the Trump administration sought to burnish its nonexistent cancer-busting image by announcing a $50 million initiative to deploy AI to fight pediatric cancer. The big shiny figure is really a drop in the bucket in terms of impact. Worse, its part and parcel of the White House’s naked embrace of the AI-hype that is driving an industrial buildout that itself causes cancer.
The only logical conclusion to glean from the simultaneous destruction of cancer research, ripping up of the rules and agencies that protect us from it, and willful zeal for fossil fuels (often wrapped up with AI-mania via the data center build out) and exempting them from air quality oversight is that this is a pro-cancer administration. They admitted as much when news broke before Trump was even inaugurated that his EPA would no longer tally the human cost of air pollution.
Whether it’s counted or not, though, it is there. The type of cancer I had is a “mild” one; I still lost a lung, had a vocal cord paralyzed, spent months barely able to get through a day, and still get winded easily. The official position of the US government appears to be that more people should have to endure that.
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DOGE Wasted Tens of Billions While Chainsawing the Government in the Name of 'Efficiency': Senate Report
A new report found that in just six months, Elon Musk's cost-cutting agency wasted more than $21 billion. Other estimates have found that the cuts will cost more than they save in the long run.
Jul 31, 2025
The Department of Government Efficiency wasn't so efficient after all. In fact, it was extraordinarily wasteful, according to a Thursday report by the U.S. Senate's investigations subcommittee.
When Elon Musk spent the early part of this year ransacking the federal government, the billionaire promised that his mass layoffs of federal employees, his choking off of critical foreign aid, and his gutting of consumer watchdogs all served a greater purpose: saving the government—and by extension, the American people—money by rooting out waste.
Musk is already known to have wildly exaggerated the amount that his initiative was saving the public. Government spending in 2025 has been higher than previous years despite Musk's dramatic cuts.
Meanwhile, some analyses after the fact have estimated that the initiatives might actually cost taxpayers money in the long run by slashing funds for tax collection and other forms of spending that increase economic activity.
(Graphic: The Brookings Institute, Tracking Federal Expenditures in Real Time)
The staff report released by the office of Sen. Richard Blumenthal (Conn.)—the ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations (PSI)—only focuses on waste by DOGE that can be quantified in the here-and-now. It finds that in just six months of operation, DOGE wasted more than $21 billion.
This comes at "the very same time," Blumenthal said, that "the Trump administration is cutting healthcare, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of 'efficiency' and 'savings,'" via the recently passed "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," which itself is projected to add $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit over the next 10 years.
Blumenthal said his investigation shows that "DOGE was clearly never about efficiency or saving the American taxpayer money."
By far the largest source of waste it identifies comes from Musk's mass layoffs of nearly 200,000 federal employees. In January, he announced the "Deferred Resignation Program" (DRP), which he described as the "fork in the road."
In order to quickly thin the ranks of government, Musk offered federal employees the opportunity to retire early with their benefits and pay through September 30—a deal that around 200,000 took. The Senate report calculates that the government has spent $14.8 billion to pay these employees not to work for eight months.
Roughly another 100,000 employees were also involuntarily fired from their jobs, and had to receive severance pay that amounts to an additional $6.1 billion.
DOGE's funding freezes also resulted in massive waste: freezes on loans for energy utility projects meant that the government lost out on $263 million worth of interest payments and fees. Meanwhile, $110 million worth of food and medicine was left to spoil in warehouses due to the shuttering of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
While many of these costs are temporary, other studies looking at the long-term effects of DOGE have found that many of the programs it cut also brought in vastly more revenue than they cost to run.
For instance, according to Yale's Budget Lab, DOGE's firing of thousands of Internal Revenue Service (IRS) employees could cost $395 billion in lost revenues over the next decade, and potentially as much as $2.4 trillion if the decrease in enforcement leads to more tax-dodging.
Musk also virtually eliminated the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), which has returned over $26 billion to American consumers since its creation in 2011 while costing a fraction of that amount to run.
Cuts to public health research by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) may also lead to significant costs in the long run. An April study by the University of Maryland found that it could cost the U.S. 68,000 jobs and $16 billion in revenue annually.
Even the $125 million cut from USAID—which the White House has claimed results in "no return for the American people"—is projected to result in nearly $29 billion lost each year by U.S.-based organizations.
Meanwhile, the human costs to these cuts, especially to USAID, have been catastrophic, with hundreds of thousands already dead from preventable diseases in a matter of months, and potentially as many as 14 million by the end of the decade.
As economics writer Maia Mindel summarized in a post on X: "Okay, yeah, so DOGE was illegal and didn't cancel any big-ticket items and also it didn't increase government efficiency and it lied about all its accomplishments and also none of its staff were even remotely qualified. But at least a million Africans died. Take that, libs."
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Report Highlights Threat Posed by 'Trump Health Cabal'
"Trump has nominated unqualified and dangerous people to serve in the most important health positions in the country," said Eagan Kemp, the author of the report for the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen.
Jul 30, 2025
The government watchdog group Public Citizen published a report on Tuesday warning that U.S. President Donald Trump's "dangerous health cabal threatens patients, providers, and the programs they rely on."
The report, written by healthcare policy advocate Eagan Kemp, takes aim at several of Trump's appointees to top healthcare posts. Among those highlighted are Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) head Mehmet Oz, Deputy HHS Secretary Jim O'Neill, and surgeon general nominee Casey Means.
"The first few months of the Trump administration have brought chaos and disaster to an already fragmented and dysfunctional health care system," the report says. "From efforts to make massive cuts to the ACA and Medicare and layoffs of huge numbers of HHS staff across the agency, it is tough to keep up with all the damage being done."
Kennedy, the report says, has aggressively promoted "conspiracy theories and dangerous anti-science views" during his time as HHS secretary.
The report notes Kennedy's fear-mongering about the safety of the highly effective measles vaccine as the U.S. experienced the largest outbreak in recent years, and his purge of credentialed independent experts from the panel that makes national vaccine recommendations in favor of a clique of anti-vaccine activists.
The report also points to Kennedy's decision to de-emphasize research into infectious disease and prescription drugs and his mass firings at other agencies within HHS, including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
"With Kennedy taking command of the HHS, Americans are presented lies and disinformation at an unprecedented scale that are capable of unwinding a century of progress on fighting disease and promoting public health," it says.
The report also highlights Oz's efforts to further privatize Medicare by championing Medicare Advantage, which it says "would leave more Americans at the whim of greedy health insurance corporations." It cites one study, which found that since 2007, overpayments to private Medicare providers added up to more than $600 billion, and could amount to another trillion over the next decade.
Additionally, the report cites findings from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that patients with significant healthcare needs were more likely to drop Medicare Advantage in favor of returning to traditional Medicare, which it says "indicates that these patients were unable to receive necessary care" under the privatized program.
It describes Oz's "massive conflicts of interest," including his six-figure investments in Medicare Advantage providers like UnitedHealth and CVS Health.
"Medicare Advantage plans regularly deny needed care, making it difficult for low-resource hospitals to remain open to serve the public," the report says."If Oz gets his wish of further expanding Medicare Advantage, it will threaten the solvency of many hospitals, particularly rural hospitals currently at risk of closure, as they would struggle to keep their doors open because they wouldn't have the consistent funding they need to continue serving their communities."
O'Neill, who was appointed last month as Kennedy's deputy at HHS, is described as "a long-time venture capital investor with concerning views that reflect his significant financial ties to for-profit biomedical companies," adding that "his interests run counter to [HHS's] public health mandate."
The report notes O'Neill—a staunch libertarian—is opposed to FDA regulations to ensure the safety and efficacy of drugs, which he said "kill a lot of people and provide a lot of harm to the economy."
He has called to eliminate the agency's mandate to ensure that drugs are effective before they are approved for sale. In a 2014 speech to a biotech group, O'Neill said the FDA should "let people start using them, at their own risk."
As an official in the George W. Bush administration's HHS, he also opposed FDA regulations on diagnostic tests that rely on computer algorithms—an even more pressing issue today given the increasing ubiquity of artificial intelligence, including in healthcare.
"While he has a limited public record of comments on health issues broadly," the report says, "his dangerous and misinformed views about the workings of the FDA provide deep cause for concern that he will prioritize ideological and corporate profit considerations over the public health mandate of the department."
Means, Trump's pick for surgeon general—who would be the top authority on public health recommendations—is described as having "little to no managerial experience in the context of government agencies or scientific research."
She does not have an active medical license, and dropped out of her surgical residency. According to colleagues, she did so after coming to believe "that modern medicine is a conspiracy to keep people sick."
A "wellness influencer" in the mold of Kennedy, she has a history of anti-vaccine views and has advocated for getting rid of the Hepatitis B vaccination for babies, which is credited with reducing HBV infection by 68% over a decade after its introduction in 1991. Means has also said that birth control pills are overprescribed, and that they signal a "disrespect of life."
She also stands to potentially profit from her decisions as surgeon general, the report says, since she remains the chief medical officer of a glucose monitoring technology company and has not stepped down from her post despite the possible conflicts of interest.
"The range of unscientific ideas, wellness products, and conspiratorial claims that Means is associated with," the report says, "makes her a potentially dangerous person to serve in a role that requires being a credible health communicator for the country and upholding sound science."
The state of healthcare in the United States, the report says, is about to become more precarious following the passage of the "One Big Beautiful Bill Act," which is projected to result in 10 million people losing their health insurance. Medicare privatization has also accelerated, with hiked rates for Medicare Advantage plans.
"The fact that Trump, Kennedy, and their allies have taken so many dangerous and misguided actions on health in just the early months of the new administration," the report says, "highlights the need for vigilance and strong pushback from anyone who wants a better healthcare system."
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'These People Should Not Be Managing a Lemonade Stand': Trump Admin Throws NIH Funding Into Chaos
The administration paused National Institutes of Health research funding before reversing course hours later amid fierce backlash.
Jul 30, 2025
The White House budget office, led by far-right ideologue and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought, temporarily halted National Institutes of Health funding for scientific research on Tuesday before announcing that the pause was lifted hours later, sparking further chaos and confusion at a key agency that's under growing attack from the administration.
The pause, which would have impacted roughly $15 billion in funding for research institutions across the United States, was implemented due to a footnote from Vought's office "in a document that doles out federal funds" to the NIH, according to The Wall Street Journal.
News of the pause, which applied to research grants and contracts, sparked immediate outrage, with Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) warning it underscored the administration's plan to "decimate lifesaving research in this country."
But the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) appears to have reversed course. The Washington Post reported that the agency "releas[ed] the funds later in the day." The Health and Human Services Department, which oversees NIH, pointed to an OMB spokesperson's statement that "the funds were released" after a "programmatic review."
"The chaos and dysfunction of the Trump administration is staggering," Murray said Tuesday. "These people should not be managing a lemonade stand, much less all federal cancer research."
The White House has proposed slashing the NIH's budget by 40% next fiscal year. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said earlier this month that the Trump administration's proposed cuts would "ultimately decrease the number of new drugs coming to market."
Tuesday's pause added to the turmoil at an agency that has already faced mass firings and attempts to slash critical funding.
Over the weekend, Vought described the NIH as "an agency that needs dramatic overhaul." Mother Jones reported earlier this year that the NIH "funded research that helped scientists better understand cystic fibrosis, which led to Vertex Pharmaceuticals developing a cutting-edge treatment" that Vought's daughter benefited from.
The Trump administration's effort to slash NIH funding "means that research into rare diseases, already inadequate, may slow down," the outlet noted.
"Ninety-five percent of rare diseases, unlike cystic fibrosis, have no treatment, according to the National Organization for Rare Disorders, and most organizations lack the budget to fund drug research in partnership with pharmaceutical companies," Mother Jones added.
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'Devastating' Trump Cuts to FDA, NIH Will Result in Fewer Medications, New Analysis Warns
"The United States' effort to bring cutting-edge treatments to patients," said a group of lawmakers, "will come to a grinding halt because of the Trump administration's devastating cuts to NIH and FDA funding."
Jul 18, 2025
One former federal health official said Friday that medications with the potential to "substantially change healthcare and improve the lives of patients" are likely to be among the dozens that won't be developed if Republicans pass a proposal by the Trump administration to slash crucial health research funding.
Jeremy Berg, a former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the National Institutes of Health, was referring to an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) of President Donald Trump's proposal to cut funding to the NIH by 40%—budget cuts that experts have warned would kneecap the country's ability to research emerging health threats and treatments, while terminating the United States' position as a world leader in medical innovation.
"The lost drugs" resulting from the budget cuts, Berg told The New York Times, "are more likely to be the novel 'first in class' drugs."
The CBO found that even a 10% reduction in the NIH budget would stop an estimated 30 new medications from coming to market over the next three decades.
A reduction in the agency's external preclinical research "would ultimately decrease the number of new drugs coming to market by roughly 4.5%, or about two drugs per year," the CBO said, with the impact of the budget cuts growing over three decades.
The CBO also analyzed proposals that would affect the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), including one that would cut staff and result in increased review times for new medications by nine months. By the second decade of the policy being in effect, said the CBO, 10 fewer drugs would be approved each decade—a 2% reduction—with 23 new medications ultimately being prevented from coming to market.
Already, the FDA's workforce has been reduced by about 15%, with 3,500 people losing their jobs or resigning.
The Times reported that the FDA has approved 25 new drugs so far in 2025; it has authorized an average of 60 new medications per year in the past.
"This unprecedented assault on our healthcare institutions by the Trump administration will cut off access to medicines that patients are waiting for, cede our global leadership in medical innovation to China, and cause wide-ranging harms to our nation's economy."
A group of Democratic lawmakers who serve as ranking members of key committees emphasized that the CBO's analysis likely vastly underestimates the impact Trump's proposed cuts would have on the NIH, as it investigated the potential impact of just a 10% budget cut rather than the full 40% cut the president has proposed.
"The proposed cuts are so enormous that CBO's own model is unable to produce an estimate," said U.S. Reps. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.), ranking member of the House Budget Committee, and Frank Pallone (D-N.J.), along with Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.).
"The United States leads the world in medical innovation because of our continued investments in research and development at the NIH," said the lawmakers. "Every $1 invested in NIH research returns $2.50 to the U.S. economy. This unprecedented assault on our healthcare institutions by the Trump administration will cut off access to medicines that patients are waiting for, cede our global leadership in medical innovation to China, and cause wide-ranging harms to our nation's economy."
"The United States' effort to bring cutting-edge treatments to patients with cancers, rare diseases, cardiovascular diseases, and neurodegenerative diseases," they added, "will come to a grinding halt because of the Trump administration's devastating cuts to NIH and FDA funding."
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Trump’s Attack on Science Will Leave Us All Sicker
Budget cuts and layoffs at major U.S. public health agencies threaten our health and well-being and will hobble scientific progress and innovation.
Jun 22, 2025
The Trump administration’s evisceration of the federal agencies that protect our health and environment is a full-throttled attack on science that will set our nation back for years, if not decades to come.
The illegal firings of thousands of employees across Health and Human Services’ (HHS) 13 divisions, the freezing of government contracts, attacks on universities, and cuts to billions in research dollars will have profound effects on our health and well-being, economic competitiveness, and standing as a world leader in science.
And the wrecking ball has just begun swinging. HHS is slated to shed 20,000 employees, or one-quarter of its dedicated workforce, and see its budget cut by 26%.
At its worst, the dismantling of federal agencies like the CDC, the NIH, and the Food and Drug Administration is cruelly calculated to hurt those most vulnerable in our society—the poor, the disabled, and the elderly.
A disdain for independent science and expertise is seemingly a root cause of the actions. As Sudip Parikh, chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and executive publisher, Science journals said at this year’s annual meeting in Boston, “Science and engineering and medicine are searches for truth, facts, and objectivity. We live in a time when that seems under threat, and we need to be able to say that.”
To his point, a May 23 Executive Order puts science under the control of politicians by giving presidential appointees broad latitude to police scientific research and conduct and punish alleged violations of its Orwellian “Gold Standard Science.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of HHS, has already acted on the EO by firing the entire advisery committee that helps guide vaccine policy for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Seventeen highly qualified, evidence-based physicians and researchers, many with decades of expertise, are to be replaced with individuals aligned with Kennedy’s anti-vaccination ideology.
The president’s appointment of Kennedy, a lawyer with no scientific training, to lead the HHS is itself an attack on expertise and truth. In four short months, Kennedy has made ill-informed decisions from announcing a change in Covid-19 vaccine policy without notifying the CDC, to offering a Florida sanctuary for Canadian ostriches exposed to bird flu, to ending the development of a vaccine for the H5N1 virus, even as researchers demonstrate its ability to rapidly spread through airborne transmission.
Science is clearly taking a backseat to grandstanding, and the consequences could be deadly.
At its best, the demolition of our public health and research institutions shows an indifference to the pain and suffering that may fall on Americans when the agencies that keep our food safe, water clean, and protect us from deadly diseases are kneecapped. At its worst, the dismantling of federal agencies like the CDC, the NIH, and the Food and Drug Administration is cruelly calculated to hurt those most vulnerable in our society—the poor, the disabled, and the elderly.
Americans are already sicker and die younger in comparison with other wealthy nations, according to a 2024 report by the Commonwealth Fund. Life expectancy is 4.1 years shorter in the U.S. compared with our peer nations, and maternal mortality, for instance, is more than three times higher than in Europe. The Trump administration’s attacks on science and medicine will only worsen these gaps.
Lawsuits challenging the legality of the administration’s executive orders are moving through the court system, but we do not yet know how all of this will play out.
Already the damages are taking a toll, with NIH being especially hard hit. With an annual budget of $47 billion, the NIH is the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research and development. It’s no coincidence that the world’s leading medical labs are located in the U.S., or that our research benefits people across the globe.
The Trump administration plans to cut NIH’s budget by $18 billion, or about 40%, and to consolidate its 27 institutes and centers into just eight. At least 2,100 NIH research grants have been terminated thus far, totaling $9.5 billion.
With at least 1,200 staff laid off all at once, and thousands more voluntarily resigning, the loss of institutional knowledge and medical expertise is staggering. The full extent of the brain drain is unknown because NIH Director Jayanta Bhattacharya has yet to report the total number of staff losses.
One of NIH’s critical roles is to fund the basic science research that underpins development of drugs and therapeutics, long before the private sector takes an interest. Companies take that basic science and further develop and commercialize vaccines, drugs, and therapies that save lives. Funding for the grants that the NIH provides these labs, universities, and institutions has largely been frozen for the past month, as part of the administration’s war on universities, even though a federal judge ordered a release of the money. Billions of biomedical research dollars allocated to Harvard, Cornell, Northwestern, Brown, Columbia, and Princeton are being withheld.
The agency has reportedly stopped vetting future studies on cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and other illnesses and slashed the programs for cancer and Alzheimer’s research.
The Trump administration also cut the overhead rate that NIH pays to research universities to keep the lights on, computers running, and lab equipment maintained from between 40% and 70% to 15%. Such deep cuts will lead to even more layoffs, and research could grind to a halt.
While a U.S. District Court ruled the change was “arbitrary and capricious,” it’s unclear whether the Trump administration will reverse the policy.
Halting research will have profound impacts on the American health system and on our health.
It will disrupt local economies and hurt our overall competitiveness. Every dollar that NIH spends on research generates more than two dollars in economic activity, not to mention the patents and biomedical startups that ensue.
Some U.S. universities are reducing or halting their PhD admissions as a consequence. Doctoral students—our scientific future—are watching their dreams die.
“Many are right now questioning the viability of being a scientist in the U.S. going forward,” Carole Labonne, developmental and stem cell biologist at Northwestern University, said in a PBS interview. We could see a brain drain in the U.S., as young scientists choose a different career path or choose another country in which to build their career.
And NIH is but one federal agency that the Trump administration is taking a chain saw to. Cuts at the Food and Drug Administration could have immediate impacts on our food safety, at a time when food contamination outbreaks are on the rise. Staff with technical expertise in nutrition, infant formula, and food safety response have been cut.
Similarly, at the CDC, staff cuts and contract freezes are coming at a time when the nation is experiencing an H5N1 outbreak in poultry and dairy cattle that may well lead to another pandemic, an unprecedented spread of measles in 33 states, and a tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas. The CDC plays a vital role, working with states and communities to understand where disease is, how to prevent it, and how to react. Simply put, we are losing people on the front lines of keeping people healthy.
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6,000+ Health Professionals Warn Trump Attacks 'Will Cost Lives'
"We cannot fill the void that is being created by these reckless and deep cuts, which are tearing apart crucial systems for protecting and promoting Americans' health," states an open letter.
Jun 09, 2025
In a open letter released Monday, over 6,000 doctors, researchers, nurses, and other health professionals issued a rebuke of the Trump administration's cuts to agencies and programs that focus on medical care and public health, as well as efforts by congressional Republicans to cut the health insurance program Medicaid.
"As health professionals on the frontlines, we have dedicated our careers to protecting the health of our patients and improving health in our communities and states," the letter states. "However, we cannot fill the void that is being created by these reckless and deep cuts, which are tearing apart crucial systems for protecting and promoting Americans' health. We are certain this will cost lives."
The U.S. Senate is currently reviewing a sweeping, House-passed reconciliation package that includes deep cuts to Medicaid, tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy, and other items.
"If Medicaid funding decreases, many Americans may go without care and most of the clinics and hospitals across the country will suffer financially. Some will have to close their doors, especially in rural areas," according to the letter.
The group also highlighted Trump administration efforts to carry out cuts at federal agencies tasked with ensuring the country's food, drugs, and environment are safe.
The Trump administration "is slashing funding for medical research and is slowing the approval of new drugs, jeopardizing our ability to provide the best care that science recommends," according to the letter. "Access to lifesaving treatments may be delayed."
The watchdog group Public Citizen published a statement on Monday which included a link to the letter, as well as a quote from Dr. Robert Steinbrook, the Health Research Group director at Public Citizen, who also signed the letter.
"We must continue to sound the alarm about the Trump administration's attacks and threats against our healthcare system," said Steinbrook.
The letter concludes with a plug for readers to challenge these actions by the Trump administration. The letter includes a way for readers to contact their federal lawmakers, and urges them to attend town halls, among other actions.
Also Monday, dozens of scientists, researchers, and other employees at the U.S. National Institutes of Health sent a separate letter addressed to NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya criticizing funding cuts.
"We dissent to administration policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe," that letter states. It says that NIH has terminated 2,100 research grants tallying some $9.5 billion and $2.6 billion in contracts since January 20.
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Disability Advocates, Civil Rights Groups Sound Alarm on RFK's Reported Autism 'Registry'
Advocates still have concerns about Trump administration officials' efforts to study autism, even after the Health and Human Services Department said there will be no autism registry.
May 13, 2025
Dozens of public health, disability rights, and civil rights groups on Monday raised "significant concerns" about a walked-back proposal from the National Institutes of Health—an entity within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services—to create a national autism registry.
Their concern stems from April comments first reported by CBS News from NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, who said during a meeting that NIH intends to create national disease registries, including one for autism. However, HHS later said it is not creating a national registry for people with autism, walking back Bhattacharya's comments.
However, NIH is moving forward with creating a "real-world data platform," which Bhattacharya also discussed during that meeting. The platform will partner with federal health insurance programs and use information from Medicare and Medicaid in order to determine the "root causes" of autism, according to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Kennedy has drawn pushback for his comments about autism in the past, including when he recently cast autism as a "tragedy" and an epidemic that "destroys families."
In a Monday letter addressed to Kennedy, the groups argue that even though HHS has said it is not creating such a registry, "the larger platform's unclear purpose and potential for abuse necessitates that HHS and NIH engage with disability and civil rights advocates and implement fundamental safeguards."
According to New York Times reporting on the database, it "is not clear precisely what kind of research will be conducted."
David Mandell, a professor of psychiatry and longtime autism researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Times it's "the registry without the word 'registry' in it."
"We are creating a tool, and tools can be used for good and for evil," he also said. "I know a lot of researchers—and I like to think of myself as one—who have used this kind of tool for good. And I'm really concerned that that's not what happens."
According to the letter, lack of clarity around what NIH specifically plans to do has led to "immense concern" among autistic people, their families, researchers, and privacy advocates.
"HHS and NIH's failure to engage with autistic people and autistic advocates has exacerbated this lack of clarity," the letter alleges.
Letter signatories include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN), and the Autism Society of America.
The groups outline three steps they say NIH and HHS can take to help establish trust around its proposed platform: "Meaningful communication with autistic people and advocates; fundamental privacy safeguards to prevent misuse and abuse; and ensuring the data platform advances the well-being of autistic people, people with disabilities, and the public health while minimizing potential harms."
The groups wrote that some data collection can enable better understanding of how to meet the needs of people with disabilities, but "disabled people in the United States have a long and troubled history with governmental efforts to find and track disability for the purpose of eliminating it."
"It's no secret that this proposal has created a lot of fear and confusion in the autistic community," said Colin Killick, executive director of ASAN, in a statement on Monday. "We continue to advocate and support research into autism that autistic people want conducted, but it is critical that autistic people's private data not be shared without our consent. We hope the administration answers our questions to shine light on how autistic people and our rights will be protected."
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Sanders Calls Trump Anti-Science Agenda an 'Attack Against Anyone Who Has Ever Loved Someone With Cancer'
A Senate HELP Committee report found that there has been a $2.7 billion drop in National Institutes of Health research funding commitments in the first three months of 2025 compared to last year.
May 13, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump is conducting an "unprecedented and illegal" broadside against science and scientists that will have devastating consequences for regular Americans, according to a report released Tuesday by Sen. Bernie Sanders, an Independent from Vermont.
The report, which casts Trump's actions as a "war on science" that will lead to "preventable suffering" and "needless loss of life," was compiled by the minority staff with the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, where Sanders is the ranking member.
To compile the report, staff interviewed federal health workers, analyzed National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant funding data, reviewed self-reported data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and more.
The report concludes that Trump's moves against science will yield fewer breakthroughs for combating diseases, a less robust public health response to future infectious disease threats, and even less trust in public institutions.
In a statement on Tuesday, Sanders said that "Trump's war on science is an attack against anyone who has ever loved someone with cancer."
All told, according to the report, as of April 2025 the Trump administration has terminated at least $13.5 billion in health funding and has dismissed thousands of employees who support America's scientific infrastructure.
In what the report calls the "clearest sign" of the administration's effort to defund science, it states that NIH committed $2.7 billion less to research in the first three months of 2025 compared to the same time period last year, representing an effective 35% cut.
When the researchers behind the report conducted an analysis of National Cancer Institute grants, they found there has been a 31% decline in cancer research grant funding in the first three months of 2025, compared to the first three months of 2024.
The report also relays accounts from federal workers who highlight the Trump administration's efforts to impose control over "scientific speech."
For example, one HHS official said: "We get requests from the media to provide scientific expertise. Normally, [political appointees] would never get involved in this type of non-high-profile stuff but now they have to approve every single media request."
Also, "researchers across the federal science agencies report that certain scientific topics now trigger heightened scrutiny or political review before publication, presentation, or grant consideration," according to the report. The researchers also state that over 100 scientific meetings have been delayed or canceled.
The report also focuses on the impact of firings at HHS. The report states that at least 10,000 workers at HHS agencies have been terminated, on top of some 10,000 who have left voluntarily of been forced out by the Trump administration, citing public reports. This tally aligns with a tracker of federal personnel cuts maintained by The New York Times.
According to the report, federal employees believe that the loss of "public capacity" could mean more power for the private sector. One HHS official quoted in the report anonymously said: "I chose to go into federal service because I care about people. I want to be able to answer to the taxpayer, not the shareholder."
Speaking of overall cuts to HHS, "the agency in charge of the health and well-being of all Americans including tens of millions of seniors, children, and working families may be cut down to... less than one-sixth the size of UnitedHealth Group," according to the report.
The report states that these firings have lead to "chaos" across HHS, and that disruptions have been particularly acute at NIH.
"Initially, we had whole labs full of people that were fired. Complete chaos. Nobody had any idea if their tests were being run," said an anonymously quoted staffer at the NIH Clinical Center—the country's biggest hospital devoted solely to clinical research.
"Trump's war on science is not making America healthy again," Sanders said. "It is making Americans and people throughout the world sicker."
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Trump Administration Plots Massive Budget Cuts That 'Would Destroy Public Health'
"Trump promised to fight for the working class, but instead he, Elon Musk, and RFK Jr. are attacking the programs and services that keep middle class, working class, and vulnerable families safe and healthy in order to pay for tax cuts for billionaires."
Apr 21, 2025
The Trump administration is preparing a budget proposal that experts say would utterly devastate public health across the United States by eliminating life-saving initiatives and hampering key medical research, with massive cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.
Under the administration's proposal, which has not been finalized and must ultimately be approved by the Republican-controlled Congress, the CDC and NIH would each see their budgets cut by 40%. Overall, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) would see its budget cut from $121 billion to roughly $80 billion under the Trump plan.
Ellie Murray, an independent epidemiologist, warned on social media that "a cut that big would destroy public health."
The administration is also pushing to consolidate departments and programs under the newly announced Administration for a Healthy America (AHA), an initiative spearheaded by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who is overseeing large-scale firings at his agency that critics say endanger the well-being of children and families across the U.S.
CNN noted that as part of a sweeping attack on public health agencies, the proposal "eliminates CDC's global health center and programs focused on chronic disease prevention, and domestic HIV/AIDS prevention."
"While some of the agency's work would be moved into new AHA centers, programs on gun violence, injury prevention, youth violence prevention, drowning, minority health, and others would be eliminated entirely," CNN continued. "The proposal would also eliminate a number of rural health programs at HHS, including grants and residency programs for rural hospitals and state offices."
Thomas Farley, a pediatrician and public health researcher, called the proposal "a bloodbath" and highlighted what he called "stunning examples" of the kinds of initiatives in the administration's crosshairs, including the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and "newborn screening programs for genetic diseases and hearing loss."
"Call your representative and send a copy of this proposed act of abject cruelty to them," Farley urged.
Members of the Democratic caucus in Congress immediately vowed to fight the proposed budget cuts, which come as the administration is gutting health agency staff and working with Republicans to slash Medicaid.
"President Trump promised to fight for the working class, but instead he, Elon Musk, and RFK Jr. are attacking the programs and services that keep middle class, working class, and vulnerable families safe and healthy in order to pay for tax cuts for billionaires," Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), the top Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, said in a statement, warning that the administration's budget blueprint would condemn "Americans to preventable disease and death."
"If this dangerous budget was ever enacted, communities across the United States would suffer," said DeLauro. "The Trump administration is aiming to further eviscerate the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration—agencies that boost public health, protect Americans from infectious diseases, lead the world in biomedical research, and help keep our food and drugs safe. President Trump and RFK Jr. want to eliminate programs focused on chronic disease, substance abuse treatment, and mental health services that save lives."
Trump and his allies, including world's richest man Elon Musk, have cast their push for large-scale funding cuts across the federal government as a necessary bid to eliminate waste and abuse.
But as the president targets programs such as Head Start—which cost the federal government roughly $12 billion in fiscal year 2024—he is pursuing a record $1 trillion for the U.S. military, a hotbed of waste and fraud.
"Your budget proposal is morally obscene," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote in a message to the White House late last week. "It must be defeated."
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