Both as vice president and again as president, Joe Biden emphasized cancer research more than any modern American political leader. The Democrat’s White House made his cancer “moonshot” a leading administration priority.
It appears his Republican successor has a different approach in mind. Politico reported this week, for example, on Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s personnel purge at the Department of Health and Human Services, which has “halted efforts to collect data” on, among other things, cancer rates in firefighters.
The cuts have … claimed the team at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) that ran the National Firefighter Registry for Cancer. While data from past years are still available online the link for firefighters to submit their own information for the registry leads to an error page. Also halted was a study on firefighters’ exposure to carcinogens during electric vehicle fires.
Micah Niemeier-Walsh, the vice president of a local union affiliate that represents workers in NIOSH’s Cincinnati office, including those who worked on the firefighter registry, told Politico, “We cannot collect any additional data. This is a congressionally mandated program that Trump himself signed into law in 2018, and we were researching what leads to elevated cancer rates in firefighters and how to reduce them.”
This came roughly a week after The Washington Post published a striking report on potentially breakthrough research at the National Institutes of Health, where scientists have “demonstrated a promising step toward using a person’s own immune cells to fight gastrointestinal cancers.”
The day the scientists’ paper was published, the Trump administration imposed devastating layoffs at the NIH. The Post’s report added, “Two patients’ treatments using the experimental therapy had to be delayed because NIH’s capacity to make personalized cell therapies has been slowed by the firing of highly skilled staff and by purchasing slowdowns. Those occurred even before major layoffs took place.”
A few weeks before that, The New York Times reported that the Trump administration also terminated funding for research at Columbia University, where scientists were “examining the use of artificial intelligence to detect early signs of breast cancer.” Two weeks before that, the Times also reported on researchers at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Pittsburgh who’d spent months preparing for a clinical trial of a new drug to treat advanced cancers of the mouth, throat and voice box. They were all set to start enrolling patients when their clinical trials were halted — because of a hiring freeze imposed by Trump, Elon Musk and the DOGE initiative. Note that these are just some of the headlines from the last month or so. Not only are there other examples from Trump’s second term, but reports along these lines are also likely to become increasingly common in the near future. Voters might not have appreciated that a Republican victory in 2024 would mean sweeping cuts to cancer research, but here we are.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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