I am among some 40% of Americans who are diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lifetime. However, when taking into account my family and entourage of baby-boomer friends, I reckon that statistic could even fall somewhat short of reality.
Fortunately, since America declared war on cancer more than 50 years ago, there have been decades of minor breakthroughs that would accrue over time, transforming both our understanding of the disease and our ability to treat it.
One way to look at the cumulative effects of these breakthroughs is to look at the survival rates. In the mid-1970s, America’s five-year survival rate sat at 49%; today, it is 68%. We can correlate America’s sustained investment in cancer research with these returns. I have been cancer-free for more than five years and am blessed to revel in leading an active, healthful, and blissful lifestyle.
“Now an extraordinarily successful scientific research system — one that took decades to build, has saved millions of lives and generated billions of dollars in profits for American companies and investors — is being dismantled before our eyes,” wrote Jonathan Mahler in The New York Times Magazine this month.
Here are some egregious examples:
Research to improve the effectiveness of cancer immunotherapy — canceled;
Study to improve childhood cancer survival rates in low-resource hospitals — canceled;
Development of a new technique for colorectal cancer prevention — canceled;
Project to analyze premalignant breast cancer tissue in high-risk women — canceled.
According to Mahler’s reporting, in a matter of months the Trump administration has canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in cancer-related research grants and contracts, arguing they were part of politically driven DEI initiatives. It has suspended or delayed payments for hundreds of millions more in an attempt to sharply reduce the percentage of expenses the government will cover for federally funded cancer-research labs.
The Trump administration 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.
The president’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year calls for a $2.5 billion cut to the National Cancer Institute’s $7.2 billion budget, bringing it down to pre-2014 levels. This is the NIH agency that leads most of the nation’s cancer research.
This dismantling of cancer research can be easily seen as collateral damage in a larger, partisan ideological war against the scientific establishment and the academic institutions where much of the country’s biomedical research takes place.
Johns Hopkins University leads all U.S. universities and colleges in NIH support. It receives roughly $4.2 billion annually in federal research support, but has already lost $800 million in funding and laid off more than 2,000 employees. According to The New York Times, these cuts have impacted both international and domestic research, jeopardizing critical public health and scientific projects worldwide.
Harvard, Northwestern, Cornell, Brown and the University of Pennsylvania are among those whose NIH funding was cut off because the White House claimed they had violated the civil rights of their Jewish students. All of these institutions received little or no warning.
At the Department of Veterans Affairs, an estimated $35 million in already-funded research — including for cancer — was thrown into jeopardy when Trump instituted a hiring freeze. At the EPA, staff were instructed to cancel existing grants, including to the Health Effects Institute, which has published research on the link between air pollution and cancer.
And in the stop-gap funding measure, set to expire this month, Republicans cut about 60% from the Defense Department’s Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs, including funding for research on breast and ovarian cancers. (The programs for pancreatic, kidney and lung cancer disappeared from the agency’s list of funded projects and rolled under another program, which did not receive any additional funding for 2025.)
Whether the administration’s actions are legal or not, they have succeeded in blocking the disbursement of a lot of congressionally approved funds. Between Jan. 20 and Aug. 20, the NIH paid out $4.3 billion less in grants than it did during the same period last year. The NCI, for its part, paid out $842 million less.
Basically, tearing down America’s cancer-research system by clearing out civil servants and scientists while choking off the flow of money to universities and research centers is part of the Trump administration’s plan to end its “woke and weaponized bureaucracy.” More importantly, it represents part of an insidious plan that threatens the health of all Americans.
It’s hard to put a price on the value of research that might be years away from a new drug or treatment modality. It’s even harder for those who have been kicked out of clinical trials in the past few months, where the stakes are clearly life or death.
When President Donald Trump moved back into the White House, the United States was years into its Cancer Moonshot, a multibillion-dollar Democratic effort to halve cancer deaths by 2047. Now it appears that the moonshot might have lost its chance to land.