President Donald Trump and DOGE bro Elon Musk’s drastic cuts to National Institutes of Health grants will lead to more children dying of cancer, the director of the nation’s leading childhood cancer hospital said Monday.
Charles Roberts, director of the St. Jude Comprehensive Cancer Center, which treats thousands of children with cancer at no cost to their families, said that the Trump administration’s announcement that the NIH will slash funding for labs, equipment, and staff will force cancer centers to cut back on research for new treatments.
“This will likely mean fewer new treatments will get to children and therefore that fewer children will be saved,” Roberts said.
The NIH cuts were part of Musk’s effort to slash the federal budget as part of his likely illegal Department of Government Efficiency.
“Can you believe that universities with tens of billions in endowments were siphoning off 60 percent of research award money for ‘overhead’?” Musk wrote on X. “What a rip-off!”
But experts say that Musk’s assertion is flat out wrong, proving that he simply does not understand how biomedical research is funded.
According to The New York Times:
By law, all applicants for N.I.H. grants divide their budgets between “direct costs” — the research itself — and “indirects,” which are more general costs like lab equipment, utility bills, payroll services and so on. Indirects also help cover N.I.H.’s very expensive requirements for tracking dangerous chemicals, hazardous waste disposal, radiation safety, fire security and so on.
It’s hard to calculate that precisely (how much did it cost to have the lights on for 10 hours last Tuesday?) so decades ago, the government decided to do it as a percentage — written into the terms of the grant — of the whole. Which is the actually efficient way to do it.
Research institutions like St. Jude and other major universities and health centers will be forced to either shut down facilities or cut back on research.
Roberts told Bloomberg News that the cuts will cause his institution alone to lose $40 million annually, which will lead to difficult decisions about which research they will pursue.
Because of the devastating impact the NIH cuts will have on biomedical research—as well as thousands of jobs across the country—the new policy has received bipartisan criticism.
“While the administration works to achieve this goal at NIH, a smart, targeted approach is needed in order to not hinder life-saving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions like those in Alabama,” Alabama Republican Sen. Katie Britt told AL.com.
And Sen. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said that the “poorly conceived directive” would lead to the end of “vital biomedical research” and “the loss of jobs.”
Already, the new NIH policy has been hit by multiple lawsuits.
On Monday, 22 Democratic attorneys general filed a lawsuit alleging that the NIH violated the law in capping the amount of funds allocated toward research institutions’ overhead costs. And a federal judge quickly granted those states a temporary restraining order that blocks the NIH from enforcing the cuts.
New York Attorney General Letitia James
That means that—for now—only states with Democratic attorneys general will maintain their research budgets, while states with Republican attorneys general who refuse to go against Musk and Trump will suffer.
“Too many Americans have lost loved ones to cancer, Alzheimer’s, and infectious disease. Researchers at @SUNY and @CUNY rely on funding from @NIH to find a cure, but Trump’s cuts could put those efforts at risk. We just won a court order ensuring this research can continue,” New York Attorney General Letitia James wrote on X.
A group of universities also filed a lawsuit Monday, alleging that the “flagrantly unlawful action by the National Institutes of Health … will devastate medical research at America’s universities.”
“Cutting-edge work to cure disease and lengthen lifespans will suffer, and our country will lose its status as the destination for solving the world’s biggest health problems,” the lawsuit said. “At stake is not only Americans’ quality of life, but also our Nation’s enviable status as a global leader in scientific research and innovation.”
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