President Trump’s first proposed budget could turn Joe Biden’s cancer “moonshot” into more of a crater, a devastating blow to the former vice president just days after he implored people to help him eradicate the deadly disease.
Under the president’s blueprint, the National Institutes of Health would lose about one-fifth of its current budget, or $5.8 billion. Moreover, Trump’s budget calls for a significant consolidation of federally-funded medical and scientific research programs and a rebalancing of federal contributions to research funding.
About $240 million of the current NIH budget goes toward grants and contracts awarded to scientists and researchers outside the agency’s campus, many of whom have been involved in research on cancer immunotherapy, early detection and vaccines since the Obama administration launched its “moonshot” initiative and task force in 2016.
“The budget supports a new ‘moonshot’ to finally cure cancer, an effort that will be led by the vice president and will channel resources, technology and our collective knowledge to save lives and end this deadly disease,” Obama stated in his final budget.
The former president requested a $755 million combined increase for the NIH and Food and Drug Administration in 2017 to “accelerate progress in preventing, diagnosing and treating cancer” and “to improve health and outcomes for patients through investments in research and infrastructure.”
“We put in place a moonshot to cure cancer and other diseases,” said Dr. DJ Patil, who served as chief data scientist in the Obama White House. “This new budget will end that hope [with] devastating cuts.”
On Sunday, at the annual South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, Biden told a convention hall packed full of attendees that his sole mission is to “spare other families” the grief he and his wife endured when they lost their 46-year-old son, Beau, to brain cancer in May 2015.
“I am unwilling to postpone for one day longer the things we can do now to extend people’s lives,” Biden said, adding that his one regret was not being able to be “the president who presided over the end of cancer as we know it.”
