Following court decisions that blocked some NIH grant cancellations or rendered them “void” and “illegal,” NIH official Michelle Bulls in late June told staffers to stop terminating grants. However, NCI workers told KFF Health News they continue to review grants flagged by NIH to assess whether they align with Trump administration priorities. Courts have ordered NIH to reinstate some terminated grants, but not all of them.
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At NCI and across NIH, staffers remain anxious.
The White House wants Congress to slash the cancer institute’s budget by nearly 40%, to $4.53 billion, as part of a larger proposal to sharply reduce NIH’s fiscal 2026 coffers.
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Bhattacharya has said he wants NIH to fund more big, breakthrough research. Major cuts could have the opposite effect, Knudsen said. When NCI funding shrinks, “it’s the safe science that tends to get funded, not the science that is game changing and has the potential to be transformative for cures.”
Usually the president’s budget is dead on arrival in Congress, and members of both parties have expressed doubt about Trump’s 2026 proposal. But agency workers, outside scientists, and patients fear this one may stick, with devastating impact.
It would force NCI to suspend all new grants or cut existing grants so severely that the gaps will close many labs, said Varmus, who ran NCI from 2010 to 2015. Add that to the impact on NCI’s contracts, clinical trials, internal research, and salaries, he said, and “you can reliably say that NCI will be unable to keep up in any way with the promise of science that’s currently underway.”
The NCI laboratory chief, who has worked at the institute for decades, put it this way: “If the 40% budget cut passes in Congress, it will destroy clinical research at NCI.”
KFF Health News Correspondent Rae Ellen Bichell contributed to this report.
KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling, and journalism.
