Washington D.C. – As Trump Health Secretary RFK Jr.’s has made empty excuses for the administration’s painful and regressive cuts to NIH research grants during Congressional hearings this week, the New York Times reports today: “Spending on new medical research by the National Institutes of Health has fallen roughly $1 billion behind the pace of years past, delaying thousands of scientific projects and raising concerns within the agency that it may struggle to pay out the money it was allotted by Congress.” The Times found Kennedy “has become involved this year in flagging certain grant awards and stopping their release.”
Reaction from Kayla Hancock, Director of Protect Our Care’s Public Health Project: “The cruel and unusual stonewalling of NIH grants is among the biggest indictments of RFK Jr.’s incompetence and whacked priorities. The Trump administration can apparently find plenty of money for a $1 billion a day war in Iran, billionaire tax breaks, and even handouts for the United Arab Emirates, but RFK Jr. says they had no choice but to gut NIH research into treatments and cures that deliver a more than 2.5-to-1 return on taxpayer investment. Kennedy claims he’s just cutting “insane studies”, but what’s ‘insane’ about now-cancelled trials involving cancer, heart disease, infectious diseases, and mental health conditions? Out of racial animus, the Trump-RFK Jr NIH has been so obsessed with denying that health care disparities exist among people of color that they’ve managed to derail the entire agency from doing critical research and stifling medical innovation that benefits everyone. That’s what’s really insane, and Donald Trump is proposing to make matters far worse with another $5 billion cut to NIH to fund his unconstitutional war and tax breaks for billionaires.”
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