Bryan Dozier/NurPhoto via AP
“United in Blue,” a flag installation organized by the organization Fight Colorectal Cancer, is seen on the National Mall in Washington, March 14, 2025.
Amid the chaos of Donald Trump’s misrule—what with his on-again, off-again trade war causing a sharp slide in the dollar, a rise in American borrowing costs, accelerating inflation, and possibly a severe recession—his attack on basic medical research is getting less attention. Elon Musk’s DOGE goons have slashed federal grants across the country, and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is putting through further sweeping layoffs and budget cuts. Meanwhile, Trump’s war on immigrants is targeting top medical researchers.
In particular, cancer research and treatment in America is being gored. Development of promising diagnostics and treatments has been called into question or frozen, clinical trials are being halted, and—unless the cuts are stopped—hospitals around the country will be bankrupted. Many Americans will die soon, and many more will die in future who could have been saved.
Let me start with immigration. America has the most advanced medical research system in the world, which has attracted brilliant researchers from many countries. The flip side of that fact, however, is that system depends to a great degree on highly skilled immigrants. In any previous administration, the legal status of such people would be all but sacrosanct—people might argue about deporting unauthorized construction workers, but not a handful of world-class scientists with legal visas or green cards.
Until now. For instance, the cancer scientist Kseniia Petrova, a Russian immigrant who worked at Harvard’s renowned Kirschner Lab, has been in a Louisiana ICE prison for two months now, and is facing deportation to Russia because she allegedly lied to a border control officer about carrying frog embryos for research purposes. Not only is this likely false—she told NBC News that she did tell the officers the truth—but the usual penalty for such a piddling violation is a $500 fine, knocked down to $50 for a first offense. Instead, ICE revoked her J-1 visa and threw her in prison pending a hearing to deport her back to Russia, where she might easily end up in prison or dead for criticizing the Putin regime.
Petrova is not just any cancer scientist—she is perhaps the world’s top expert on analyzing the images produced by a new cutting-edge, ultra-specialized microscope that is being developed to diagnose cancer cases. Leon Peshkin, Petrova’s manager, told NBC that the task “requires a unique set of skills because you have to both be able to work as an embryologist and do applied math, modeling, data analysis and bioinformatics—all in one package.” Nobody else in the lab could do what she does, he added.
This and many other stories have spread panic among America’s scientists, immigrant or otherwise. ICE and CBP goons are clearly itching for any excuse to imprison, deport, or otherwise harass immigrants of any kind. White European tourists who normally would have been casually waved through to their vacations are being locked up and deported on preposterous pretexts. If a literally irreplaceable cancer researcher at Harvard isn’t safe, nobody is safe. Fully three-quarters of American scientists are considering fleeing to Europe or Canada, per a recent survey. Scientific conferences—vital for the production and dissemination of new research—are being canceled or moved to free countries.
America has the most advanced medical research system in the world, which depends to a great degree on highly skilled immigrants.
All that will damage America’s cancer research and treatment plenty. But direct funding is also being slashed. The National Institutes of Health is by far the largest funder of medical research in the world, with a budget of almost $48 billion in 2023. Thus far, an estimated 780 grants have been canceled outright as of early April, thousands of NIH researchers have been fired, and as Josh Marshall writes at Talking Points Memo, the NIH funding pipeline appears to be mostly frozen because DOGE goons have gummed up the approval process.
As a Nature investigation explains, so far the primary attack vector for NIH grants seems to be on right-wing culture-war bugaboos like research into LGBT people, HIV/AIDS (presumably due to the conservative idea that infection is just punishment for premarital sex), and anything having to do with minorities. But vaccines are also a target, particularly the mRNA technology used for COVID-19. Kennedy, of course, is an anti-vaccine conspiracy enthusiast of long standing, and clearly is aiming to ban all vaccines eventually.
But mRNA is not just useful against COVID or other viruses. This near-miraculous technology is showing all kinds of promise against many illnesses, including cancer, because it is so highly adaptable. A new vaccine against pancreatic cancer—one of the deadliest types—customized to each individual case is showing great promise in early trials. But with so much funding being cut all over the place, and mRNA tech under attack, it’s an open question whether it will make it to market.
Formal cancer research isn’t immune, either. CBS News reports that 47 projects at the National Cancer Institute have been canceled, with more coming every day. And the Congressionally Directed Medical Research Programs (CDMRP), a three-decade-long Defense Department initiative that funds numerous projects to find cures and treatments for cancer, was cut by 57 percent in the Republican-written continuing resolution to fund the government.
Finally, the broad assault on university funding is going to hit hospitals hard. Both elite research and baseline hospitals are commonly part of universities across the country. For instance, The Harvard Crimson estimates that of Trump’s proposed $9 billion cuts in funding affiliated with Harvard, $6.2 billion will actually fall on Boston hospitals. It’s a similar situation in North Carolina, where the famous Research Triangle is being bludgeoned.
House Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid that could reach as high as $880 billion over a decade—or about 29 percent of the entire program—will hurt hospitals and other providers even more. Medicaid is the largest single insurer in the country, and is especially vital in rural, heavily Trumpy areas. If all these cuts go through, those providers are going to close down en masse.
Summing it all up: Many of the people who are developing the next generation of cancer diagnostics and treatments are being run out of the country, the funding pipeline for research and trials is being strangled, and the institutions that provide access to existing treatments are being pummeled. If I were to imagine a plan to ensure as many Americans as possible die of cancer in future, this is what I would do.
The abject stupidity of all this is breathtaking. It appears to be the product, at least in part, of DOGE fascists embracing willfully evil cruelty for its own sake, and Kennedy’s toxic woo-woo ideology. Beneath his facade of talking about healthy living and wellness, Kennedy is actually a eugenicist. He insists that viruses and bacteria only kill people who don’t eat healthy and exercise by his lights—essentially rejecting the germ theory of disease.
It’s an odd position coming from someone who sounds the way he does because of an unfortunate chronic condition that, ironically enough, is often caused by measles or mumps, and can be ameliorated or prevented with vaccines. But just like Pete Hegseth running the American military through group chats including his wife and brother, this is the standard for the second Trump administration: The worst people in the entire country in charge, ruining everything they touch.
