Washington is dismantling the pathway to the next cancer breakthrough

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill

Pancreatic cancer kills almost everyone it reaches; fewer than 1 in 7 patients lives five years after diagnosis. So, when researchers reported this spring that an experimental mRNA vaccine, in an early trial, had kept most of the patients whose immune systems responded to it alive years later, it was the kind of result that changes what a diagnosis means. A related vaccine has cut the risk of melanoma’s return by nearly half. After decades of false dawns, this one looks real.

We are celebrating that breakthrough at the precise moment Washington is taking apart the research base behind it. On May 29, the Office of Management and Budget proposed a rule to do it on paper, across every federal science agency.

The rule requires political appointees to sign off on who gets funded. It downgrades scientific peer review to advice an agency is free to ignore. And it lets the government cancel grants already awarded when projects are judged “no longer in the federal government’s interest.” It is scheduled to take effect Oct. 1., and the public has until July 13 to comment.

The administration calls this “accountability.” The executive order behind the rule is titled, “Improving Oversight of Federal Grantmaking.” Officials say they are only making sure taxpayers are funding what they call gold-standard science.

Setting broad national research priorities is a legitimate job for elected leaders. But this rule does more than that. It hands appointees who answer to a political agenda the decisions that used to belong to scientists who know the field. We have already seen where that leads. The same leadership pushed vitamin A during the measles outbreak, and children were soon hospitalized in Texas with signs of vitamin A toxicity. That is not the judgment I want deciding which cancer trials are worth funding.

It is fair to point out that these cancer vaccines came from industry, not government. BioNTech, Genentech, Moderna and Merck built them. But industry does not build these from scratch. It builds on decades of federally funded discovery in RNA and immunology, on the science that won the 2023 Nobel Prize in medicine and on a workforce trained in university labs that public grants keep open.

The government has already turned against part of that platform. In August it canceled 22 mRNA vaccine projects worth nearly $500 million, aimed at the next pandemic, with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calling mRNA more risk than benefit. The evidence does not support him.

This rule would not cancel those industry trials tomorrow. The damage is slower, and worse: it weakens the public base the next generation of cancer vaccines will grow from. You do not kill a field in a single stroke. You defund its base, stigmatize its tools and hand the next decision to politics.

The 2026 budget request would cut the National Cancer Institute by roughly 37 percent. The proposed rule would let an appointee, rather than a panel of scientists, decide which cancer trials live and die. Each of these has happened before as a one-off. What the rule adds is reach: The same logic, written into the regulations, bind every agency at once.

Last spring, the National Cancer Institute froze a $7 million grant to a Harvard breast cancer laboratory — not over the quality of its science but because the administration had frozen Harvard’s research funding over its handling of campus antisemitism. The lab lost one-third of its staff before the money was restored months later. Under the proposed rule, a freeze like that would be far easier to justify, as a matter of shifting government priorities rather than scientific merit.

The cancer death rate in this country has fallen by one-third since 1991. It fell because the government made a long, patient bet on research that pays off over decades rather than in the immediate fiscal years — the same bet that produced the vaccine now giving pancreatic cancer patients time they would not otherwise have.

The people celebrating that result are standing inside the return on money spent before most of them were ever diagnosed. The proposed rule would stop us from spending it for the patients still to come.

Congress controls the appropriations the budget only requests; it can refuse the cut to the National Cancer Institute. The rule is open for public comment until July 13. Scientists, universities and patients can object to language that makes peer review optional and lets the government drop awarded grants on shifting political grounds.

The wall between politics and peer-reviewed science is not bureaucratic housekeeping. It is what produced the breakthrough we are all cheering, and it is worth defending while there is still time to say so.

Robert B. Shpiner, M.D., is a clinical professor of medicine and neurocritical care at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

Washington is dismantling the pathway to the next cancer breakthrough

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