While much of the focus on Capitol Hill lately has been on the Republicans’ megabill, the White House quietly unveiled some details of its budget plan for the next fiscal year late on Friday afternoon. If you didn’t hear about it, that’s because you probably weren’t intended to.
As Democratic Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a written statement, “It’s telling that President Trump has chosen to release his budget on a Friday night with no fanfare whatsoever.”
As The New York Times reported, the Trump administration’s plan would impose steep spending cuts across a “vast array of education, health, housing and labor programs,” though there was one element of this that stood out for me. From the Times’ article:
[A]s part of a reorientation that slashed federal health spending, the president proposed chopping funding at the National Cancer Institute by more than $2.7 billion, nearly a 40 percent decrease, drawing a sharp rebuke from cancer research supporters late Friday. … The cut to cancer research is part of a roughly $18 billion reduction at the National Institutes of Health.”
“For the past 50 years, every significant medical breakthrough, especially in the treatment of cancer, has been linked to sustained federal investment in research” by the institute, the American Cancer Society Action Network said in a statement. “This commitment has contributed to the remarkable statistic of over 18 million cancer survivors currently living in the U.S. today.”
What’s more, as Murray’s office noted in an analysis of the White House blueprint, Donald Trump and his team also intend to take regressive steps on cancer by eliminating the Title X program, which helps millions of Americans afford cancer screenings.
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.
His Republican successor clearly has a different approach in mind.
The release of Trump’s budget comes roughly a month after the administration laid off employees at the NIH’s cancer research institute.
A month before that, 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. American voters last fall might not have realized that a Republican victory in 2024 would mean sweeping cuts to cancer research, but here we are. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
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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