HOW TRUMP CRUSHED CANCER RESEARCH

WHEN DONALD TRUMP movedback into the White House, the United States was years into its Cancer Moonshot, a multibillion-dollar Democratic effort to halve cancer deaths by 2047. There was a kind of stalemate: New cases of the disease were emerging about as often as before; deaths were ticking steadily lower; the US Food and Drug Administration was approving new treatments, if not quite as quickly as anyone wanted. But the taps of federal funding were open as never before, from the Department of Defense to the Environmental Protection Agency to the largest funder of cancer research in the world, the National Institutes of Health.

- BY Elisa Muyl AND Anthony Lydgate

But then Trump decided that American science research was, somehow, too woke. He paused NIH grant-making for more than two months, holding up an estimated $1.5 billion in funding. He effectively halted clinical trials of new drugs. He laid off thousands of employees at the FDA, the NIH, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 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.