In The Headlines: A good week for NIH, a bad week for Vinay Prasad

While doing somewhat-routine reporting on this year’s Senate Appropriations Committee bills, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter, quickly realized that he was seeing a full bipartisan rejection of President Donald J. Trump’s plan to defund and therefore dismantle biomedical research in the United States.

In this episode of In the Headlines, Paul, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor, and Claire Marie Porter, reporter, discuss the GOP-led turn of events that reversed the Trump administration’s cuts to NIH, as well as the very public departure of Vinay Prasad from FDA following a snowballing of attacks on his political purity led by Laura Loomer.

“Basically what we learned is that instead of cutting NIH, the Senate is actually giving NIH a raise, and the House has essentially an allocation that does not reflect the president's priorities of cutting NIH by 40%. God knows why,” Paul said. 

The bill represents one of the first pieces of good news for NIH and other federally funded biomedical and health research institutions since Trump’s inauguration.

“We are impartial, we cover science. But we believe in science. We believe in spending money for science,” Paul said. “We believe in all of this, or else we should be doing something else.”

Stories mentioned in this podcast include: 

• GOP-led Congress rejects Trump’s plans to gut medical research Senate bill gives NIH a $400 million raise

• Vinay Prasad falls from grace at FDA upon flunking Trump political purity test MAHA leaders agree on one point: COVID was mishandled. Is that enough to run science-based agencies?

• U.S. News & World Report expands evaluation of outcomes in cancer subspecialties

• USPSTF doesn’t lean right or left—it’s about data, not politics

• UPenn study supports continued use of ODAC voting

A transcript of this podcast is available: https://cancerletter.com/podcastc/20250806-nih-prasad/