Today would have been my mother’s 67th birthday, if not for a chance encounter with colorectal cancer and five arduous years of aggressive, ultimately futile treatment. Though she lost her battle, her final years would have been immeasurably worse without the invaluable advances in modern cancer care pioneered by federally funded medical research.
President Trump’s recent decision to authorize sweeping cuts to federal cancer research isn’t just a backward, self-harming policy decision that weakens America’s science leadership and jeopardizes tens of thousands of skilled jobs. It is a betrayal of human beings whose tax dollars fund the research that is materially improving the overall quality of their lives.
Thomas Jefferson listed life first in the Declaration’s litany of unalienable rights because he understood that, without life, every other benefit of freedom is moot. It’s time for today’s Republicans to showcase their commitment to life — and to America’s continued dominance in cancer treatment — by defending federal research grants from the Department of Government Efficiency’s short-sighted buzzsaw.
Trump’s cuts to medical research are deep, vast and seemingly executed without any review of whether the studies in question are effective. Gone is a $5.3 million federal grant to support Columbia University’s cancer center, a victim of Trump’s personal loathing for Columbia’s liberal antiwar student protesters. It doesn’t matter that Columbia’s researchers achieved landmark results last October when they successfully engineered bacteria to attack cancer cells — a discovery that drew global acclaim. In Trump’s government, the politics of revenge always comes first.
Also gone are grants related to cancer treatment in different groups, including a $87,000 Emory University grant study why gender-diverse people are less likely to get cancer screenings and a $407,000 grant to the University of Michigan to study why some gender minorities show higher rates of smoking-related cancers.
If you’re a Republican reading this, you may have chuckled at those two studies as exactly part of the “wokeness” problem voters elected Trump to solve. But there’s a real reason why it’s important to conduct these studies — and it’s one fiscal conservatives should appreciate.
Delaying treatment or failing to run tests on higher-risk groups sharply raises the risk of developing advanced cancers. That’s hell on a person who is now facing the fight of their life, but it also costs the government vastly more money to fight late-stage cancer than it does to provide more effective preventive and early-term care. The U.S. spends over $52 billion annually on the first year of patients’ cancer treatment and just $43 billion on cancer screening, even though every dollar invested in screening saves taxpayers roughly $7 in future cancer treatments.
Trump’s cuts are also landing in areas where Republicans didn’t expect — mainly in their electoral backyards.
One cut hit the Defense Health Research Consortium, which spends nearly half of its $1.5 billion federal grant on cancer research under the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs. Without that money, DHRC’s world-leading research into kidney, pancreatic and lung cancers has ground to a halt. In Iowa, which struggles with high cancer rates, federal cuts have meant not only a disruption in research but also an uncertain future for cancer care centers statewide.
Rural Americans are 10 percent more likely to die of cancer than those in cities, largely due to disparities in care. The gap in care will worsen as Trump’s cuts bite, meaning many red states’ cancer hubs will either reduce service or close. That’s inconvenient for Utahns who travel 150 miles to the National Institutes of Health-financed Salt Lake City cancer center. It’s devastating for Nevadans and Montanans who travel nearly 500 miles to visit the same hospital — only to find budget cuts mean their appointments are canceled, their care is delayed and their research trials canceled.
The Trump administration’s blind rage about wokeness means the government will end up spending more money on preventable cancer treatments today while compounding those costs into the future. As America cedes its role as a cancer research innovator to powerhouses like China, private investment will increasingly move away from American drugmakers and research universities to those willing to invest in long-term studies.
Of all Trump’s economic hijinks, suffocating the nation’s dynamic research sector could have the longest and deepest hangover effect.
It’s popular to say that our political division is killing us. In the case of Trump’s billions of dollars’ worth of cancer research cuts, it is literally true. Our elected officials have a moral and constitutional obligation to improve and protect the lives and welfare of the American people by funding research that saves their lives. I bet their mothers would say the same.
Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.
