Cancer Patients Sacrificed On Trump’s Altar

Forty percent of Americans will face cancer. Instead of protecting us, Trump wages war on science itself, gutting research and gambling with every heartbeat, every family, every future.

Guest article by Michael Cohen. Follow him on Substack for more by clicking here.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash

Every one of us, bar none, knows someone who has been stolen from us by cancer. The curse spares no one. I’ve watched it hollow out children who never got to play ball in the park, teenagers who never got to feel their first kiss, young parents who never saw their kids graduate, and elders who deserved the dignity of growing old but were instead chewed apart by a disease that has no conscience. Cancer doesn’t care about your politics, your bank account, your religion, or the color of your skin. It doesn’t discriminate. It devours.

And yet, here we are in America, in 2025, watching the Trump administration take a sledgehammer to the very system we’ve spent decades building to fight this killer. Who asked for this? Who benefits from it? Why is this happening?

Let’s back up for a second. More than 50 years ago, America declared war on cancer. At the time, there was naive optimism; the belief that beating cancer would be as straightforward as splitting the atom or putting a man on the moon. But cancer, it turns out, isn’t a singular enemy. It’s thousands of enemies, each mutation a different battlefield. There was no miracle cure, no single silver bullet. What we got instead was decades of hard-fought, incremental progress. And you know what? That progress saved lives.

In the 1970s, if you were diagnosed with cancer, you had barely a coin-flip’s chance of making it five years. Today, because of sustained investment, because of government funding, because we decided as a society that this was a war worth fighting, the survival rate has risen from 49 percent to 68 percent. Every $326 spent by our government on cancer research has bought one additional year of human life. Think about that: a single year, for the cost of a one-night standard hotel room. That’s not abstract. That’s mothers, fathers, children, and friends. That’s birthdays celebrated, graduations attended, weddings danced at. That is the one thing — no matter who you are — you just can’t buy. That’s time.

But now, in the span of a few months, this administration has gutted the system. Hundreds of millions in grants: gone. Payments for research contracts: suspended. Federal employees who ensured life-saving discoveries reached patients: terminated. And in the coldest, most callous move of all, the Trump administration’s proposed budget slashes the National Cancer Institute’s funding by 37 percent. Thirty-seven percent. Let that number sink in. From $7.2 billion to $4.5 billion — the smallest budget in more than three decades once you adjust for inflation.

And I’m left asking again: Who the hell asked for this?

Did you go into the voting booth thinking, “Yes — I want to cut cancer research by a third”? Did anyone? Show me the town hall where families stood up and demanded: Defund the labs. Fire the scientists. Mass Cancer Now. Slow down the progress on the disease that kills one in three of us. It didn’t happen. Because this isn’t democracy at work. This isn’t some groundswell of public opinion. This is cruelty dressed up as fiscal policy.

The White House tells us this is about rooting out so-called “politically driven DEI initiatives.” That’s the excuse. But let’s not kid ourselves. This isn’t trimming fat; it’s amputating muscle, tendon, and bone. It’s a deliberate and conscious effort to dismantle one of the most successful scientific enterprises America has ever built. An enterprise that has saved millions of lives, generated billions in economic return, and kept this country at the forefront of medical innovation.

So, who benefits? That’s the ugliest question of all. Not patients. Not families. Not the oncologists fighting in hospitals every day. No, the winners here are short-term political optics, culture-war ideologues, and the billionaire class that’s always eager to watch public institutions fail so private industry can swoop in, charge ten times more, and profit off our grief.

But here’s the reality: cancer doesn’t care about your ideology. It doesn’t pause to ask if you pulled the lever for a Republican or a Democrat. It doesn’t salute the flag before it metastasizes. It doesn’t read your bank statement before it takes your child. It is universal. It is relentless.

And what we are witnessing right now is not just defunding; it is betrayal. A betrayal of the scientists who’ve dedicated their lives to inching us closer to cures. A betrayal of families who live with the terror of a diagnosis. A betrayal of every American who believed — however naively — that our leaders would at least protect the fight against the one enemy we all share.

This is the quiet violence of policy. You won’t see it splashed across a chyron the way you see a riot, or a war, or a mass shooting. But the body count will come. It will come in delayed treatments, in slowed research, in missed opportunities. It will come in the silences at dinner tables where laughter used to be.

So I ask again: Who asked for this? Who benefits from this? Why is this happening?

And when the cancer diagnosis comes, and it will — because for 40 percent of Americans it’s not a matter of if but when — will anyone still believe this was just about “cutting costs”? Or will they finally see it for what it is: a conscious choice to let disease win, to let the clock run out on human lives, to sacrifice progress for power.

Because the truth is simple. We didn’t lose the war on cancer. We were winning. And now, by design, we’re surrendering.

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