Cancer disparities researchers say federal funding changes have disrupted their work

Cancer disparities cost lives and researchers push to understand what is behind these gaps. Federal funding for such work has slowed since last year. Andrew Brookes/Image Source/Getty Images hide caption

Why are some people more likely to get cancer, and to die from it than others? Rural Americans, for instance, are 18% more likely to die from cancer overall, and Black women are 35% more likely to die from breast cancer than white women. That's according to a recent report from the American Association for Cancer Research, or AACR.

Cancer disparity researchers study these gaps and how to close them. Their work has contributed to reductions in many disparities.

But the AACR report found that federal policy changes have affected about 93% of surveyed researchers in this field.

"Many medical trials were stopped in the middle — meaning those patients suddenly didn't receive the treatments they were getting, because the funding stopped," says Mariana Stern , professor of preventive medicine and urology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC and chair of the report committee.

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The report draws on a survey of 122 researchers including professors, scientists and students. Seventy-eight percent said they've been unable to apply for funding, and 59% said ongoing research projects were disrupted. And 59% of respondents said the funding that was lost came from the National Institutes of Health, or the NIH.

The report also points to data published in JAMA Oncology in November showing that in roughly the first half of 2025, the Trump administration canceled 181 grants from the National Cancer Institute, or NCI, a division of the NIH. The grants totaled more than $317 million and many studied disparities.

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All told, thousands of grants across NIH were terminated in 2025, according to a non-profit called Grant Witness which tracks terminations and other changes to grant funding for scientific agencies. These funding cuts followed an executive order in January 2025 calling to end "radical" and "wasteful" DEI research.

Heather Pierce , senior director for science policy at the Association of American Medical Colleges, AAMC, described the funding disruption as a mass termination "for simply not moving forward priorities of a new administration." She says that under prior administrations "termination was reserved as a very extreme remedy," and that the scale was unprecedented.

While many cancelled NIH grants were restored after several court cases fighting the change, there have been other terminations since, reported by the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency overseeing the NIH. And, fewer new grants from the Cancer Institute and the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities have been awarded this year than they have at this time in previous years.

There have been other disruptions with grant funding. Pierce says that there has been a "continued slowdown this year" in grant making and renewals.

Some researchers in the field are alarmed about the funding slowdown — and are worried that as it hinders their ability to do their work, it will translate to poorer patient outcomes.

"If we take our foot off the pedal of disparities research, there will be more Americans — in rural communities and others not near [centers of excellence] — who will not do well," says Dr. Robert Winn , the cancer center director at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Pennsylvania who was not an author of the 2026 report but whose work was discussed in it.

In response to questions about cuts to cancer disparities funding, the NIH said in a statement: "NCI identifies cancer disparity research as a priority and recognizes that advancements in the field generate knowledge benefiting all patients across the cancer continuum, from prevention and early detection to treatment and survivorship."

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"Completely unprecedented"

Scarlett Lin Gomez , a professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at University of California, San Francisco, says the Greater Bay Area Cancer Registry, which she leads, has gotten NCI funding for the last 53 years.

"We received a cut that was completely unprecedented in the years my registry has been funded through the NCI. We've not had a cut of this magnitude at all — by far," Gomez says.

Gomez runs a lab of approximately 50 people. Gomez says she had to let go of about seven full-time employees last year and expects she'll have to let go five or six more this year.

"It literally keeps me up at night — the impacts on individuals in my lab," Gomez says. "I'm hearing from colleagues over the past several months [that] everybody's looking at doing the same thing … It's scary to even think about what that's going to look like and what the impact is going to be."

Winn concurs: "It's been disruptive. It's forced folks to be creative to keep things going."

Stern, who researches cancer epidemiology, personally had to reframe some of her work to stay compliant and keep funding. In some cases, she simply reworded funding requests. In other cases, she had to change the focus of the project.

Stern had previously gotten federal grant funding for training and career development for students from racial and ethnic minorities to help them get into medical school or go into research. This is important, she says, to "overcome structural reasons minorities are underrepresented" in medicine.

"The data show that patients do better when they're treated by people who look like them, speak their language, and understand their culture — and research moves faster when teams are diverse and include members of the communities they're trying to understand," Stern says.

But, she says, the researchers had to change focus under Trump's executive orders: "We are no longer allowed to have programs that target exclusively racial and ethnic minorities."

"When you look at what percent of Ph.D. or medical graduates belong to racial and ethnic minority communities, you see underrepresentation," she says. "We still have a way to go — but with the current political climate, right now, it's impossible to do that."

Tackling gaps

The AACR report stresses that progress has been made on cancer disparities and that today's gaps are narrower than they were a generation ago.

For example, Stern says "the Black community historically has had much higher cancer death rates and incidence compared to the white population." That gap has narrowed from about 34% higher in the 1990s to 9% higher today.

Cancer disparities research contributed to this progress, according to the report.

"If we don't continue to support the research and the clinical care, all the progress we've made over the last 30-plus years — and all the progress to come — is literally at risk," Winn says. "That keeps me up at night."

Many disparities remain. The report finds veterans face 72% higher odds of skin cancer and rural Americans are 18% more likely to die from cancer overall — including a 36% greater likelihood for lung cancer.

The report calls such disparities "among the most profound forms of inequity and injustice."

"It's an injustice," Gomez says, "and we understand that a lot of these disparities can be avoidable."

And medical disparities cost American society about $451 billion a year , says Stern, citing a 2023 study published in JAMA , which estimated the medical costs and the value of productive life-years lost, calculated at $100,000 a year.

Cancer disparities research, Gomez says, informs not only the gaps in outcomes and care among everyone in the U.S. but also the effect of individual and biological differences — providing a clue for scientists to better diagnose and treat cancer.

"Without both of those lines of evidence … we simply have no way of intervening," Gomez says.

Winn led a program studying cancer disparities when he was director of the Virginia Commonwealth University Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center. The program partnered with the Chickahominy Tribe, assessing the cancer burden in rural Virginia, identifying possible environmental factors, and deploying culturally tailored cancer care.

"We did water testing, we had interesting findings," Winn says. But more importantly, he says, "we were building trust, because we were creating access to care."

Winn says that everyone should care about cancer disparities research because it could mean life or death for a disease that can happen to anyone.

"Cancer doesn't care whether you're rich or poor, whether you're from the south side of Chicago or the east end of Richmond," he says. "It doesn't care."

Researchers also worry about the impact funding cuts will have on the next generation of physicians and scientists.

"The studies we do don't only contribute data — they contribute to training and workforce development, so all that stops when the funding stops," Stern says.

Stern says more and more of her students are now hesitant to go into academia.

Gomez agrees. "We're definitely seeing an academic brain drain, and this current environment is certainly going to further hasten that," she says.