Trump’s cuts to cancer research imperil Joe Biden’s legacy Cancer Moonshot initiative

The sitting president has gutted cancer research pretty much everywhere he can, with almost no regard to the pain it might inflict on cancer patients and their families.

(White House photo)

By Jeff Nesbit

A quick pop quiz: What are the American people paying closer attention to right now?

1. Former President Joe Biden’s stage four prostate cancer diagnosis and the ongoing drama surrounding his physical and mental health over the last two years of his presidency?

2. The heartless, awful fact that current President Donald Trump has gutted cancer research pretty much everywhere he can, with almost no regard to the pain it might inflict on cancer patients and their families?

It isn’t even close. Fox News, cable TV pundits and the right-wing media ecosystem are obsessed with Joe Biden’s health. Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., cracks jokes at Joe (and Jill) Biden’s expense almost immediately upon learning of the cancer diagnosis. Vice President JD Vance decides the teachable moment is to bash Democrats rather than express even a modicum of sympathy for Biden.

Meanwhile, Trump’s deep, heartless, ideological cuts to cancer research—including, most notably, his 2025 budget proposal and deep cuts to staff at the National Institutes of Health that essentially obliterate one of Biden’s signature efforts first as vice president and then as president, his Cancer Moonshot initiative, don’t come up in political discussions all that much.

Now would be a good time to raise them up.

Let’s start with the Cancer Moonshot initiative. Joe Biden has been talking about this heroic effort to lower the incidences and rates of cancer—which he rightly compared with former President John F. Kennedy’s efforts to put an American on the moon—for nearly a decade.

Biden launched the Cancer Moonshot initiative while he was vice president in the Obama White House. He did so shortly after his son, Beau, died from brain cancer at the age of 46. The initiative was modest in the beginning, but it grew over time.

When he became president, Biden expanded it significantly. It was housed at the NIH—an institution widely recognized as the gold standard for original, groundbreaking biomedical and cancer research. The National Cancer Institute, part of NIH, was an important part of the Biden Cancer Moonshot.

“Every day, thousands of Americans hear that dreaded word, that C-word," Biden said in 2016 at a speech at the MD Anderson cancer hospital in Texas as he launched the Cancer Moonshot. "What happens next is a difference between life and death. If there's treatment there, then you know there's hope, but for some people, hope is a clinical trial."

Echoing John F. Kennedy’s words that day, Biden said that America can achieve great things when it sets its mind to it. The Cancer Moonshot did just that at NIH and NCI.

Then, as president, Biden doubled down on his commitment to fighting cancer through NIH and NCI research. His administration funneled hundreds of millions in critical cancer research funding through HHS to NIH and NCI.

And Trump’s reaction? It wasn’t to make America great again by reaching for the moon and cures for cancer, as Biden envisioned. No, it was to destroy and dismantle the very agencies carrying out that critical cancer research at HHS—namely, NIH and NCI.

The Trump administration cut cancer research funding by 31 percent in the first three months of 2025 compared with the same period the previous year (Biden’s last year as president), according to a recent report from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

Sanders’ report says that Trump had declared a “war on science.” And the first and perhaps biggest casualty in Trump’s war on science? Cancer research and, quite specifically, the Cancer Moonshot legacy initiative of Joe Biden.

Sanders’ report found that at least $13.5 billion in health funding had been terminated as of April, including 1,660 grants, while thousands of scientific staff were fired. Among the hardest hit was NCI, which lost more than $300 million from January to March compared with 2024. That cut drove NCI to its lowest level in more than a decade. NIH, the Sanders report said, lost $2.7 billion.

The cuts in cancer research at NIH and NCI dropped funding levels below what they were when Biden launched the Cancer Moonshot initiative in 2016.

“These cuts are a major hurdle to moving cancer research forward,” Selma Masri, associate professor of biological chemistry at the UC Irvine School of Medicine, said in a report on the devastating impact of the research cuts at NIH.

The impacts are personal—and devastating—for cancer patients and their families. The Sanders report chronicled what Trump’s devastating cuts to cancer research mean to a 43-year-old colorectal cancer patient.

This woman (quoted anonymously in the Sanders report, probably because Trump’s administration and his echo chamber have aggressively targeted his critics), said she had tried surgery, radiation, and dozens of rounds of chemotherapy. Her last hope, she said, lay with experimental T-cell therapy through the cancer research initiative at NIH.

That NIH cancer trial ended abruptly because of cuts to cancer research and NIH staff ordered by the Trump White House through Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. “The reality is that by reducing money and staff, the NIH will not be able to produce my treatment— and it might cost me my life,” the cancer patient said.

It’s not like Trump, like pretty much all of America, doesn’t know what these cuts in cancer research mean. As Julia Busiek wrote for the University of California Newsroom, “Cancer takes a staggering toll on American lives and families: Nearly 40 percent of people in the United States will be diagnosed with the disease at some point in their lives, and almost 1 in 5 Americans will die of it.”

But, honestly, I’m not sure Trump or anyone in his administration cares. They’re more concerned with punishing their critics and enemies—especially Joe Biden and his legacy Cancer Moonshot initiative—regardless of the immense pain and suffering it might cause to the millions of American families that benefit from that cancer research.

Jeff Nesbit was the assistant secretary of health for public affairs at HHS in the Biden administration.

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