How Trump and RFK Jr. could change health funding priorities

In April 2017, three months after Donald Trump was inaugurated president, tens of thousands of scientists and their supporters gathered on Boston Common in the damp, chilly air to protest the new administration’s proposed steep budget cuts to medical research.

The March for Science, echoed in similar rallies across the country, pushed back on Trump’sstatements denying climate change and his administration’s plan to slash billions of dollars from the National Institutes of Health, the federal government’s largest funder of medical research.

Today, as Trump assembles his team to return to the White House, scientists on the front lines are worried anew. Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is a vocal critic of vaccines and mainstream medicine who has vowed to replace 600 employees at the NIH. He has called for devoting half of the NIH’s research budget to “preventive, alternative, and holistic approaches to health,” and away from infectious diseases at a time when the COVID virus continues to mutate, bird flu is spreading to people and animals, and mpox appears to have evolved into a more dangerous form.