How the Trump Administration Is Dismantling America’s Cancer-Research System

Magazine|How the Trump Administration Is Dismantling America’s Cancer-Research System

Since President Richard Nixon declared war on cancer more than 50 years ago, America’s cancer-research system has been a triumph of government-funded science. Although some 40 percent of Americans will still get a cancer diagnosis at some point in their life, this sprawling research system — which reaches into universities all across the country — has yielded decades of minor breakthroughs that have saved millions of lives and improved the quality of life for those undergoing cancer treatments.

Today, with the benefits of decades of accrued knowledge and new advances in technology, cancer researchers are on the brink of further breakthroughs that could enable doctors to detect possible tumors earlier and treat them more effectively and with fewer short- and long-term side effects. But the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts to American cancer research are putting the entire system — and with it, future progress — in jeopardy.

For my magazine article, I spoke to 50 members of America’s biomedical-research establishment — medical-school administrators; government-funded researchers; former directors and current and former program officers and officials at the National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute.

Here are the key takeaways from the full article.

America is in the midst of one of its most productive periods in cancer-research history.

The benefits of America’s sustained investment in cancer research are borne out by striking statistics: In the mid-1970s, America’s five-year cancer survival rate sat at 49 percent; today, it is 68 percent. Every $326 that the government invests in cancer research extends a human life by one year. And there are potentially transformative research projects happening all across the country right now, like cancer vaccines and a “flash” radiation treatment that lasts just a few tenths of a second and causes much less damage to the surrounding tissue.

The Trump administration is actively dismantling the cancer-research system.

New presidential administrations have usually gone out of their way to make transitions at the National Institutes of Health as seamless as possible so as not to disrupt ongoing research. The Trump administration, in sharp contrast, has canceled hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of cancer-related research grants and contracts and suspended or delayed payments for hundreds of millions more — largely for political reasons.

It is also seeking to cut the N.C.I.’s budget by more than a third, and to sharply lower the percentage of overhead expenses that the government will cover for federally funded research labs.

Traditionally, there have been only two political appointees inside the N.I.H; since Trump took office, that number has grown to more than 20.

The research bureaucracy is at the heart of the cancer-research system’s success.

America’s cancer-research system depends on a very different model than other engines of innovation, like Silicon Valley, whose influence has grown in Trump’s Washington. The government research system is not a culture of individual visions, competitive silos and overnight growth; it is a culture of collaboration, incremental progress and the gradual accumulation of shared knowledge. It is sprawling and diffuse, but it is also uniquely vulnerable, because it depends almost entirely on government funding and because once ongoing research projects are interrupted, they can be very difficult to restart.

The changes underway threaten to derail potentially transformative moments.

My article highlights the work of a lab at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School led by Rachael Sirianni, who has spent the last several years working on a new treatment for an aggressive form of pediatric brain cancer known as medulloblastoma.

Sirianni was making good progress, and in late 2024, she applied to the N.I.H. for two new grants to continue her work. But days after the Trump administration took office in January, the meetings to review her applications were canceled and not rescheduled for months. UMass Chan was soon facing its own research-budget crunch because of the ongoing disruptions at the N.I.H. Sirianni had no choice but to shrink her lab and suspend one of her most promising pediatric brain-cancer trials.

Sirianni is just one of thousands of cancer researchers around the country suddenly confronting the ongoing uncertainty. 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.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page

18

of the Sunday Magazine

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