If the American public were polled about whether the government should fund research into helping children with heart defects, it’s a safe bet that this would receive overwhelming public support. And yet, The New York Times reported on the Trump administration abruptly cutting off federal funding for research at Cornell University, which halted an effort to develop a heart pump for babies and children with heart defects.
The pump has been under development for decades, but researchers said they had reached a critical moment: Before they had received a stop-work order a month ago, they had planned to soon start testing the device on sheep. ‘We’ve come to a screeching halt because we’re 100 percent dependent on this money to do this work,’ said James Antaki, a biomedical engineering professor leading the research. Unless the funding is restored within the next few months, he said, the project will be ‘cast to the four winds.’
This isn’t a situation in which the Trump administration cut funding because it thought the research was “woke.” In fact, by all accounts, the PediaFlow heart pump is completely uncontroversial.
But the White House has launched a brutal offensive against higher education in recent months, specifically targeting universities that handled pro-Palestinian student protests in ways Donald Trump didn’t like. That includes Cornell, which led the administration to withdraw, among other things, a $6.5 million research grant to help children with heart defects at a critical juncture.
NBC News’ report on this explained, “An infant’s heart is about the size of a large walnut. When a baby is born with a hole between the chambers of the heart, it can be a life-threatening condition. [Antaki created] a AA battery-sized device that uses a rotating propeller on magnets to increase blood flow, helping them to survive surgery or live at home with their family until a donor heart is available, if needed.”
The grant that Cornell expected to receive, the NBC News report added, would have supported “further testing of the prototype, including placement in an animal to ensure it won’t harm humans, and completion of the mountain of paperwork needed to move through the Food and Drug Administration’s regulatory process.”
It’s still possible that the administration could reverse course on this — it’s happened many times since the president returned to power — but for now, this potentially lifesaving research is on indefinite hold, not because it lacks merit, but because the White House has a culture war to fight.
As upsetting as these developments are, they’re also part of a larger pattern. Last week, for example, The Washington Post reported: A decades-long campaign to prevent infants from dying in their sleep has become a casualty of the Trump administration’s federal workforce cuts, and doctors fear it could contribute to more infant deaths at a time when mortalities have already been rising. The office within the National Institutes of Health that led the Safe to Sleep campaign, a public information effort to prevent sudden unexpected infant death, was shut down on April 1, according to two former NIH officials and two program partners who spoke with The Washington Post.
The Post’s report, which has not been independently verified by MSNBC or NBC News, quoted Rachel Moon, a doctor who chairs the American Academy of Pediatrics’ committee on infant sleep death and who wrote its recommendations on safe infant sleep. “To have this program be terminated when the number of deaths is going up is really quite devastating,” she said. “If we take [the messaging] out, then more babies are going to die. That’s what I’m worried about.” A week earlier, ProPublica had a related report on the bigger picture: The staff of a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part so that babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. The federal office that oversees the enforcement of child support payments has been hollowed out. Head Start preschools, which teach toddlers their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced to shut down en masse, some as soon as May 1. And funding for investigating child sexual abuse and internet crimes against children; responding to reports of missing children; and preventing youth violence has been withdrawn indefinitely. The administration has laid off thousands of workers from coast to coast who had supervised education, child care, child support and child protective services systems, and it has blocked or delayed billions of dollars in funding for things like school meals and school safety.
The Post’s Catherine Rampell, a new MSNBC co-host, recently summarized, “They’ve persecuted immigrants, transgender people and scientists. They’ve targeted the rule of law and free speech. Now, they’re coming for your children, too. It’s been largely lost in the cacophony over President Donald Trump’s tariffs and vendettas against universities, but administration officials have been gutting services that keep children alive and well.”
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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