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.
If it seems as if this year has featured one report after another about Donald Trump and his team effectively giving up on combating cancer, it’s not your imagination. The president has proposed slashing funding for the National Cancer Institute. His conspiratorial and anti-science health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., scrapped funding for mRNA research, despite clinical trials showing mRNA-based vaccines increasing survival in patients with deadly cancers. I’ve lost count of how many cancer-related research grants at universities have been cut off without explanation.
It’s against this backdrop that The New York Times reported that a half-century after Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, there have been a great many breakthroughs that have saved and extended lives. The incumbent Republican president, however, is effectively waving the white flag in this war. From the article:
In a matter of months, the Trump administration has canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in cancer-related research grants and contracts, arguing that they were part of politically driven D.E.I. initiatives, and suspended or delayed payments for hundreds of millions more. It is trying to sharply reduce the percentage of expenses that the government will cover for federally funded cancer-research labs. It has terminated hundreds of government employees who helped lead the country’s cancer-research system and ensured that new discoveries reached clinicians, cancer patients and the American public. And the president’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year calls for a more-than-37-percent cut to the National Cancer Institute — the N.I.H. agency that leads most of the nation’s cancer research — reducing it to $4.5 billion from $7.2 billion. Adjusting for inflation, you have to go back more than 30 years to find a comparably sized federal cancer-research budget.
In a companion piece, the article’s author, Jonathan Mahler, noted that the timing of the retreat is especially cruel — “America is in the midst of one of its most productive periods in cancer-research history,” he noted — and even if a more sensible administration takes office after Trump’s exit, it won’t be possible to quickly reverse course.
“The disruptions to existing projects and larger doubts about the government’s commitment to funding future cancer research are already causing damage that may be very difficult to undo, potentially depleting the country’s supply of scientists and scientific innovation for decades to come,” he concluded. Or as Dr. Kamila Naxerova, who was working at Harvard to try to understand how cancer spreads in the body before the Trump administration halted her progress, recently told the Times, “It’s people who will get cancer in 10, 20 or 30 years who will really pay the price for these cuts.” American voters last fall might not have realized that a Republican presidential victory in 2024 would mean sweeping cuts to cancer research, but that’s precisely what they’re getting.
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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