On April 15, President Trump signed a wide-ranging executive order that aims to lower drug prices, boost transparency into fees charged by middlemen, and limit Medicare payments for outpatient services provided by hospitals.
Harvard University lawyers rejected the Trump administration’s demand to change the school’s leadership, student disciplinary policies, admissions and hiring, and end diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.
The Trump administration did exactly what it said it would do to disorient anyone involved in making policy or touched by it. The president and his crew have “flooded the zone”—the term and the image are theirs, as is the strategy of dropping a flurry of executive orders and memoranda that shake the foundations of the American system of government, raising questions of legality and constitutionality, and, above all, making it a challenge for anyone to see the entire picture and think strategically.
“The historic National Cancer Act of 1971 has often been called ‘Nixon’s War on Cancer,’ but it could as easily have been called ‘Kennedy’s War on Cancer,’ and with perhaps greater justification,” writes Richard Rettig, a historian of the National Cancer Act (The Cancer Letter, May 23, 2008).
The Biden administration has left NIH in a weakened state, intensifying politicization of science on Capitol Hill and eroding the bipartisan support the government’s premier biomedical research agency has traditionally enjoyed.
President-elect Donald Trump said he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to the post of secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, placing the vaccine skeptic in charge of a vast empire of research, engineering, regulatory, and health care agencies.