The pause of billions of dollars in research funding to universities has had devastating effects on cancer research as lab work is put on hold and schools are halting the acceptance of new Ph.D. students.
The Trump administration’s war with higher education, combined with efforts to reduce government spending by the Department of Government Efficiency, has left significant casualties in cancer research, which in the U.S. is largely done at colleges and universities.
Experts fear four years of these sorts of attacks will take decades to recover from and stall the progress of treatments even as cancer rates rise.
“I see a large number of people who should be at the great universities over the next 10-15 years trying to figure out how to bail out right now, and I’m afraid we’re going to lose a generation of America’s best researchers, and that’s going to be a huge setback for us,” said Otis Brawley, an expert in cancer prevention and control at Johns Hopkins University.
“It may take us 20-30 years to overcome three or four years of the scientific system being ignored, devalued and even harmed by some of the stuff that’s going on now,” Brawley added.
Studies are getting hit on multiple fronts, particularly at schools being targeted by the administration due to alleged inaction on antisemitism or an unwillingness to meet President Trump’s demands.
The president of Harvard University, which is suing over its cuts, has warned numerous times the billions of dollars in funding frozen will significantly affect medical advancements. In March, Harvard announced a hiring freeze amid the financial uncertainty under Trump.
And along with the school-specific funding blocks, cancer research grants have been affected by cuts to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other agencies within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). An analysis in JAMA on earlier this month found the NIH alone cut almost $1.5 billion in funding in less than 40 days.
Along with a decrease in grants, the NIH is also losing thousands of staffers in a reduction of its workforce.
“We’ve seen institutions like Johns Hopkins and the University of California system already starting to make some cuts to their overall staff,” said Sarah Spreitzer, vice president and chief of staff for government relations at the American Council on Education.
“We’ve also seen institutions pause the acceptance of new Ph.D. or postdoc students because they’re unsure of where the federal funding situation may be this year or even into next year. And given the fact that the president’s budget request has an over 40 percent budget cut to the National Institutes of Health, I think that’s likely going to continue,” Spreitzer added.
Reached for comment, an HHS spokesperson said the department “remains committed to advancing cancer research and other serious health conditions.”
“These areas continue to be high priorities for both NIH and HHS. Ongoing investments reflect our dedication to addressing both urgent and long-term health challenges,” they said.
The slash to cancer research comes after former President Biden aimed for major medical advancements through his “Cancer Moonshot” initiative.
The former president also revealed Sunday he has been diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer, drawing increased focus to that disease in particular.
A minority staff report from the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee this month said the Trump administration cut $2.7 billion in funding to NIH since January and warned the actions “will lead to fewer breakthroughs for diseases like cancer, a weaker public health response against future infectious disease threats, and a continued decline in trust in public institutions.”
HHS shot back at the report with a post on the social platform X, saying the “claim of a ‘war on science’ is unequivocally false.”
“Under @SecKennedy’s leadership, HHS is streamlining programs, eliminating redundancies, and—above all else—prioritizing gold standard science that will deliver on @POTUS’s promise to Make America Healthy Again,” the department added.
The situation with research funding is likely to only get worse, however, as universities plan out their budget for the next academic and fiscal years. Schools are going to struggle with predicting what type of funding cuts could hit them as the Trump administration has made clear it is not done going after universities.
“What we’ve seen with the Trump administration is they’ve completely slowed down the peer review process, where they are not funding things at the same level or amount that they were previously. They’re also terminating a lot of grants,” Spreitzer said.
“I think looking forward to the fiscal year 2026 budget requests like what our schools would expect in funding from the National Institutes of Health, that’s where they proposed an $18 billion cut. Some of that is to cancer research,” she added.
Elena Fuentes-Afflick, chief scientific officer of the Association of American Medical Colleges, said researchers are “waiting for more clarification” as many of the termination notices provided by the government say their projects “does not fit with agency priorities” without laying out “what are the agency priorities.”
“We know that research staff around the country have lost their jobs because when the grant ends, is terminated, there is no funding for that project. And universities are trying to understand the magnitude of this issue, the duration of the issue. … But this unexpected change makes it difficult to do robust planning,” Fuentes-Afflick added.
The cuts and changes to NIH grants are the subject of multiple lawsuits, including one coming from 16 Democratic state attorneys general, who argue the terminations did not go through a lawful review process and are asking a judge to restore the funding.
Experts emphasize the money put toward cancer research has made discoveries that have far-reaching impacts across the medical field.
The federal government got heavily involved in funding cancer research in the 1970s when then-President Richard Nixon declared a war on cancer.
“Funding for cancer research has grown dramatically since 1971, and it spilled over into other diseases as well, because we found out that just as when you do work on breast cancer, it can benefit prostate cancer or lung cancer. We found out, just as you do work on cancer, you can find out information, develop techniques and study and understand more about rheumatoid disease,” Brawley said.
“All these drugs that I see advertised on TV nowadays, many of them, even though they’re for Crohn’s disease or rheumatoid arthritis, they actually were developed partially because of supportive cancer research,” he added.
