Trump’s NIH Slashed Research on Chronic Diseases in 2025. Will It Happen Again? |
Mother Jones illustration; Getty(2)
As disease researchers around the country received letters last year that their grants had been cancelled, National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Jay Bhattacharya declared his agency was merely clearing out the clutter. Those terminated grants do “not actually have anything to do with promoting the health of the American people,” he told Science.
Experts weren’t buying that explanation at the time, and now they have the data to rebut it. A new report from the Senate health committee details deep cuts into research on some of the leading causes of death in the United States.
Over the last 12 months, the NIH has slashed hundreds of grants for research related to Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. These conditions also happen to be among the favorite talking points of the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. In his 2025 inauguration speech, Donald Trump vowed to “end the chronic disease epidemic,” a promise repeated by Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., who has zeroed in on nutrition and environment as key factors.
Given RFK Jr.’s focus on “diet-related chronic disease”—a phrase he repeated as he unveiled his new food pyramid—one might expect he’d be a fan of Lisa Goldman Rosas, a Stanford epidemiologist who, last spring, received one of those emails saying her funding no longer aligned with the administration priorities and was therefore terminated. Rosas, who studies how diet affects human health, estimates that at........