Speaking on The Cancer Letter Podcast, Taofeek Kunle Owonikoko recalled recent conversations with two junior faculty members at the University of Maryland Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center.
Confidential Trump administration budget documents show that the upcoming FY26 Budget Request will radically cut about $50 billion out of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, reshuffling agency components, and slashing the number of NIH institutes and centers to just eight.
As he addressed FDA employees, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described the Trump era as a “generational opportunity to make the regulatory agency live up to its foundational ideals” and emerge from the morass of what he described as the “deep state.”
Immunotherapy has changed the course of blood cancers and melanomas, but is stubbornly ineffective for the treatment of most epithelial solid cancers—the cancers that kill about 90% of the more than 600,000 Americans who die of cancer each year.
A diagnosis of cancer brings with it fear and uncertainty. Changes proposed by the Trump administration pose a grave new risk to those who suffer from cancer today or will suffer from cancer in the future. A future which was increasingly optimistic is suddenly far more threatening.