Louisiana doctors are sounding the alarm over a proposed massive funding cut to the National Institutes of Health. For the 2027 fiscal year, President Trump is proposing slashing $5 billion from NIH funding, representing 12% of its operating budget. Dr. Chancellor Donald, the interim chief of the division of hematology and medical oncology at the Tulane University School of Medicine, says if Congress doesn’t restore that funding by September 30th, the impact will be devastating.
“Budget cuts mean fewer open clinical trials, fewer experimental options when standard treatments fail, and doctors having fewer tools in their toolbox,” Chancellor said.
Dr. Donald says the clinical trials that lead to breakthrough treatments for debilitating diseases are all funded by money Congress allocates to the National Institutes of Health.
“Cutting funding threatens the infrastructure that keeps those trials running today and slows down the delivery of new diagnostic tools to our local clinics here in Louisiana,” Donald noted.
Donald says if NIH funding is cut, that would greatly slow down the progress in finding cures for life-threatening diseases like cancer.
“Federal funding is often the only safety net for studying rare cancers and exploring the high-risk, high-reward early science that leads to tomorrow’s blockbuster cures,” Donald explained.
Donald says NIH funding has paid huge dividends over the years. He notes that the five-year survival for breast cancer has jumped from 75% to more than 91%, metastatic melanoma survival has jumped from less than 10% to more than 50%, and childhood leukemia survival has soared from 10% to 90%.