Forty percent budget cuts issued by the White House in early September threatened long-term cancer research; recently, things have taken a more reassuring turn.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the leading funder of all cancer research in the U.S.. In his original proposal, President Trump recommended a 40 percent cut to the NIH’s budget for the year 2026. This proposal also included shutting down three of the 27 branches of the NIH and the conjoinment of the other 24 branches into eight branches. This would have greatly harmed funding for cancer research studies across the nation.
“National Institutes of Health and the National Cancer Institute, they really fund important research that wouldn’t get funded otherwise. Oftentimes, this is basic research that is too far removed from a product that industry isn’t going to fund, but nonetheless industry sort of benefits from the research funding,” Policy Principal on emerging science and advocacy at The American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network Mark Fluery said in an interview with CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/30/health/pediatric-cancer-initiative-ai)
In February, funding for biomedical research was slashed by just shy of $2 billion. Several significant budget cuts have followed intermittently from February through July; though, the one most recently shot down in September was by far the largest yet. Not only would it have impacted research progress, but the colleges in which the research is taking place.
“What a lot of people don’t maybe know,” South civics teacher Jacob Clark said, “is that the NIH research is basically done on college campuses around the nation. The funding for those research projects is coming from the federal government. So when the federal government’s funding [cuts] of those NIH projects occurs, not only does it cut off the research for the specific cancers that they’re looking at, it also affects the larger environment of the college and the types of research that colleges get to do in general.”
In recent years, several multi-million dollar cuts have been made to the NIH with
little explanation given to the public; for example, organizations like the Pediatric Brain Tumor Consortium were informed in August that federal funding for their services and research would no longer be provided after 25 years of research.
Given the contention around the funding cuts by the Trump administration, it is unclear what the necessary next step is to maintain cancer research progress. The most recent development in President Trump’s interference in the cancer treatment field has been the investment into AI in pediatric cancer studies and treatment. An executive order to move $50 million into pediatric AI cancer research was passed in late September. The hope behind this executive order was to streamline the national access to different pediatric cancer cases. In addition to the wider access and analysis of pediatric cancers, the involvement of AI is also supposed to help scientists find less harmful ways to treat cancer in pediatric patients in the future.
While this would be considered an absolute positive if successful, and researchers are optimistic, the other cuts the NIH funding has recently faced leave these researchers worried about the overall stability of progress in the field in the foreseeable future.
“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,” journalist Jonathan Mahler reported in The New York Times.
Article by Penny Deitz
The Axe 