The magnitude of Trump's cuts to medical research funding

Since the president was inaugurated, the National Institutes of Health, the world’s premier public funder of medical research, has ended 1,389 awards and delayed sending funding to more than 1,000 additional projects, according to a New York Times analysis. Through the end of April, the agency awarded $1.6 billion less compared with the same period last year, a reduction of one-fifth.

The impacts extend far beyond studies on politically disfavored topics and Ivy League universities, says the Times. The disruptions include research on Alzheimer’s, cancer and substance use and studies at public institutions across the country, including in red states that backed Trump. 

“I think people should know that research that they probably would support is being canceled,” says Eden Tanner, a chemist at the University of Mississippi, who had been working with a colleague at Ohio State University to develop a new approach to treating glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer. Their grant had been awarded through a program intended to diversify the biomedical workforce; in April, they were notified that it was being terminated.

Trump’s actions against medical research have been carried out without congressional approval, and the legality is unclear, says the Times. Lawsuits have challenged the cutting or delaying of funding.

NIH officials say they fear being fired if they process a grant renewal that the administration disfavors.

Federal officials who’ve accused the NIH of wasteful spending attribute the cuts to changing scientific priorities.

Trump’s budget proposal could cut the NIH’s total budget by about $18 billion, a cut of almost 40 percent, the Times says.

“The country is going to be mourning the loss of this enterprise for decades,” says Dr. Harold Varmus, a Nobel Prize-winning cancer biologist who was director of the NIH during the Clinton administration and director of the National Cancer Institute under President Obama.