STAT+: Despite its cancer-fighting mission, NCI starts to feel Trump administration budget ax
Trump cuts are hitting the National Cancer Institute, affecting a hotline for patients, cancer.gov, advisory panels, clinical trial recruitment.
The National Cancer Institute, 87 years old and burnished with a $7 billion annual budget and a mission to curb America’s second-leading cause of death, is the largest institute in the National Institutes of Health. At first, the NCI seemed to emerge relatively less affected by the cuts, terminations, and policy changes that rocked federal health agencies in the early months of the Trump administration.
Yet over the last several weeks, multiple sources told STAT, the NCI has started to face large-scale terminations and closures of key programs.
The cuts include the firing of virtually the entire communications team, the board of scientific advisers, and a significant number of the Office of Advocacy Relations. The NCI Outstanding Investigator award program was also terminated last month. In an interview with PBS, Steven Rosenberg, the head of surgery and a cancer scientist at the NCI, also said that the institute had fired its acquisitions department last month. The firing of the communications team was first reported by CBS.
