Every year, the University of Kansas Cancer Center must file a report with the National Cancer Institute in order to get its annual grant allotment.
Takeaways
- Scientists in Kansas City and around the country face uncertainty about federal grant funding that they fear will restrain research for generations to come.
- The KU Cancer Center, the area’s comprehensive National Cancer Institute-designated facility, has seen grants canceled and delayed since President Donald Trump returned to office. The same is true for organizations throughout the country.
- Nationally, funding lost from grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation totals almost $3 billion so far. Missouri and Kansas, combined, have lost more than $38 million.
“We literally spent days and days and days rereading that report, searching for these banned words and coming up with new language,” said Dr. Roy Jensen, director of the cancer center. “We’re not going to misrepresent (the work) we did or stop talking about it. … But we’re trying to describe what we did and not use words that are now verboten.”
The experience is not unusual. Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, scientific research and the grants that fund it have been under a microscope.
The administration has terminated or frozen thousands of grants without warning. It has moved to drastically limit what research institutions can spend on facilities and support staff, which could devastate university budgets. It has also proposed slashing future funding to the National Science Foundation (NSF) by 56% and cutting funding to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which includes the National Cancer Institute, by nearly 40%…