Trump’s Assault on NIH Will Kill People With Cancer

Supervisors inside the National Cancer Institute received a series of commands from on high late this week that, if left in place for any length of time, will grind its operations to a halt. The Trump administration is trying to kill people.

According to a source within the NCI with knowledge of the moves, the list of Don’ts is long: All scheduled travel through April must be canceled, and all registrations for upcoming conferences — including virtual ones — are gone; as is the case across the National Institutes of Health (of which the NCI is a part), all purchasing is frozen using government purchase cards; researchers cannot submit abstracts to meetings or manuscripts to journals; hiring is stopped entirely for 90 days — though it is unclear if that time frame may change — and all job listings must be pulled down; and of course, no external communications at all, and any activity remotely considered DEI-adjacent is stopped.

It is difficult to overstate the damage this can do to both cancer research and treatment. The NCI has around 3,500 employees, and is the largest cancer research funding body in the world. It supports the dozens of NCI-designated Cancer Centers around the country, and helps coordinate clinical trials across more than 3,000 sites. Though the list of prohibitions didn’t necessarily target them directly, there are reports of canceled appointments for patients set to enter some of those clinical trials.

Across NIH, researchers as well as administrators and support staff are some combination of terrified, angry, and confused. One employee told me they simply didn’t know what to do — meaning, literally how to spend the work day — once the commands to stop all purchasing, travel, and more came down. Another source within a different NIH institute said, “I feel like every time we try to keep things moving, we get another directive to stop.” Another pointed out that this will also affect training the next generation of doctors and researchers — interviewing for the NIH’s Graduate Partnership Program, in which graduate students at other universities work in NIH labs, has been suspended, and if that doesn’t lift within a month or so then there will likely be no such visitors next year.

On a longer time scale, if NCI-supported trials really are delayed or suspended for a meaningful amount of time, that means delayed discoveries, delayed drug approvals, delayed potential treatments for people whose cancer will not itself agree to such a delay. And more immediately, putting a stop to NCI activities means actual patients awaiting treatment will have to wait longer. This is attempted murder, plain and simple.