Two Democratic Senators held a forum Wednesday on Trump administration attempts to cut funds for National Institutes of Health. Panelists described how proposed cuts would affect research and patients.
Vermont Senator Peter Welch and Wisconsin Senator Tammy Baldwin, both Democrats, held the hearing-like forum in Washington to spotlight how, they argue, the administration and DOGE attempts to cut research funds would not only hurt researchers and patients, but the economy in general.
Baldwin says President Trump is seeking to dismantle the NIH.
“Without the NIH, there would be no cancer immunotherapy, no anti-overdose medications, no cutting edge treatments,” stated Baldwin.
Senator Welch said he is astonished that the government is so cavalier that it is destroying research infrastructure.
“This so-called effort to cut is a fiction. It’s really about destroying,” Welch asserted. “And that is heartbreaking to me because of those cures that are within reach that now will be in the distant, over the horizon. We’re destroying the institutions that are essential.”
A number of Northeast Democratic Senators participated in the forum, which included the former NIH director, researchers and patients. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer of New York says the lives of hundreds of millions are affected by research supported by the NIH.
“The fact that they want to cut NIH is just appalling. And they come up with this bogus stuff. They say indirect costs. They make you think it’s some kind of waste. It is buildings. It is electricity. It’s a bunch of bull that these are indirect costs that are unnecessary and you cut them and nothing bad will happen. It’ll shut down the whole enterprise,” Schumer said.
New Hampshire Senator Maggie Hassan noted that Dartmouth Health and Dartmouth Medical Center receive more than $100 million in NIH research funding. She visited Dartmouth last week and recalled some of the concerns of scientists.
"One researcher I spoke with recounted to me that her project to prevent youth mental illness and youth suicide appears to be in jeopardy. Grant officials from the Trump Administration demanded to review her slides and then censored them,” Hassan reported. “Another scientist I spoke with just had two pilot grants terminated even though these pilot grants were focused on how to improve primary care especially in rural communities, taking away resources that support over 500 physicians in rural New England."
Emory University Associate Professor and Alzheimer’s disease researcher Dr. Whitney Wharton reinforced the danger of losing researchers as she related to Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey how the 2013 federal budget sequestration impacted her and other young researchers.
“We lost a ton of people in general but we lost a lot of women. I know one woman, one other woman, in my cohort who is still doing this,” recalled Wharton.
“I’m going to fight. I am going to fight for all of those young researchers who want to find a cure for Alzheimer’s, for cancer, for diabetes, for Parkinson’s, for all of those diseases,” Markey promised.
Former NIH Director Dr. Monica Bertagnoli added that Trump Administration cuts would also decimate cutting edge research towards cures.
“We can point to diseases just in my career time that were an absolute death sentence that can now be cured,” noted Bertagnoli. And we can also point to some diseases right now, Alzheimer’s, ALS, that there are cracks in the dam here. There are for the first time ever some truly promising directions.”
Last week, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote to the acting director of the NIH to demand answers about the harm cuts would have.
“We cannot afford to lose a generation of scientific breakthroughs. We cannot afford to lose a generation of scientists,” Warren asserted. “We need to restore the cuts to NIH and we need to expand the funding and support for medical research across the board.”
The cuts include canceling more than 200 NIH research review meetings and terminating more than 300 grants.
