Bernie Sanders Finds How Much Trump Has Cut in Medical Research Funds

Under Donald Trump’s administration, the National Institutes of Health have slashed more than half a billion dollars in medical research on some of the leading causes of death in America.

A report published Friday by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, found that the NIH had gutted $561 million in funding for research on cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s disease.

Despite research on these illnesses being fully funded by Congress, the Trump administration has chosen to terminate at least 320 grants mid-study and abandon thousands of patients across 304 clinical trials, including 69 trials for children. In addition to destroying years of work, the Trump administration’s actions have prompted an entire generation of medical researchers to question the viability of building a career in the United States.

So, how did the NIH decide what to cut? “The criteria for these decisions are not scientific. They are political,” the report stated.

Interviews with staff revealed that the NIH used a list of banned words to determine which research projects deserved extra scrutiny, including terms such as “COVID,” “climate change,” “diversity,” “disadvantaged backgrounds,” as well as multiple terms for Black men and women.

It’s worth breaking down what exactly losing that half a billion dollars detailed in the report has cost Americans.

The report found that the NIH has terminated or frozen 116 cancer research grants totaling $273 million. Included in that total was $20 million for the Duke Specialized Program of Research Excellence in Brain Cancer in North Carolina, where researchers investigated the leading cause of cancer deaths for children under 15.

The NIH has also terminated or frozen 65 Alzheimer’s research grants totaling $94 million, upending years-long research studies that were finally beginning to yield new drugs and diagnostic tools.

Additionally, the organization halted funding for 14 of the 35 NIH-funded Alzheimer’s Disease Research Centers, totaling approximately $65 million. The agency also canceled meetings of the National Advisory Council on Aging, delaying the disbursement of an estimated $600 million in grants. After years of bipartisan investment, the Trump administration cut the number of new Alzheimer’s research projects by nearly one-third in a single year, according to the report.

Despite Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s crusade to “Make Americans Healthy Again” by flipping the food pyramid upside down, the NIH actively gutted research into diabetes by $83 million and heart disease by $111 million.

Nicholas Tartaglione, a mass murderer and the former cellmate of Jeffrey Epstein, is claiming that the Trump administration wanted the sexual predator dead. 

In a pardon petition filed last summer and obtained by The Daily Beast, Tartaglione claimed that Epstein was placed in harm’s way on purpose, so that he would die before being able to testify in court and incriminate any of the wealthy elites who abused young girls with him.

“It is no coincidence that prior to trial I was transferred to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan and deliberately placed in the same cell as Jeffrey Epstein,” he wrote. “I clearly was not protected on purpose, nor was Epstein. I truly believe that the government wanted both Epstein and me dead.” 

The “government” would have been that of President Trump in 2019—an interesting claim given that it’s Trump from whom Tartaglione is requesting this pardon.  

Tartaglione and Epstein had a strange relationship, as the latter accused Tartaglione of trying to kill him three weeks before he was found dead. Tartaglione denies the accusation, and says he even saved Epstein when he had a “piece of string” around his neck. 

Tartaglione’s claim only adds more fuel to the fire of speculation surrounding the Epstein files and the elite cabal of abusers held within them. The White House dismissed reports of Tartaglione’s letter, writing “Anyone is able to submit a pardon request—much like everything else the Daily Beast writes, no one should take their garbage seriously.”

Tulsi Gabbard’s presence at an FBI raid in Fulton County, Georgia, last week has led to some finger-pointing within the Trump administration.

On Thursday, President Trump was asked why Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, was at the raid in which ballots from the 2020 election were seized. He responded by blaming Attorney General Pam Bondi, saying that Gabbard “took a lot of heat ... because she went in at Pam’s insistence ... and she looked at votes.”

“They say, ‘Why is she doing it?’” Trump said. “Because Pam wanted her to do it.”

On Friday at a press conference, Bondi failed to set the record straight when a reporter asked her about Trump’s assertion.

“DNI Gabbard was down in Atlanta last week for the Fulton County search. Originally, this office said that she was not part of the investigation. She put in a letter to Congress that President Trump directed her to do so, and then now President Trump yesterday said that it was at your insistence that she went down there. So what is the case here?” the reporter asked.

Bondi responded that she and Gabbard are “inseparable,” along with others who were at the press conference Friday (which included FBI Director Kash Patel and U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro).

“She was down there with Deputy Director Andrew Bailey of the FBI,” Bondi said, referring to Gabbard. “I’m not going to talk about any other details of that matter right now because Georgia is a very important issue to us. She was there, we’re inseparable, that’s all I’ll say.”

It looks like Bondi is trying to protect herself, avoid contradicting Trump, and cover for Gabbard at the same time. It’s very irregular for Gabbard, whose job is supposed to focus on foreign intelligence, to be involved in an investigation over supposed 2020 election fraud in Georgia (which was disproven in court long ago). Trump himself is unusually close to the investigation, discussing the Fulton County raid with Gabbard and FBI officials who were present. What is actually going on, and what is the end goal?

While he was in the process of being confirmed to run America’s public health policy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. swore several times over that his heavily scrutinized 2019 visit to Samoa, and the island’s subsequent measles outbreak, had “nothing to do” with his vaccine skepticism.

Newly revealed emails, obtained by The Guardian and the Associated Press, indicate that was not the case.

Emails sent at the time between a U.S. Embassy official and a United Nations staffer illustrate that the true intention of Kennedy’s trip was always about vaccines.

“We now understand that the Prime Minister has invited Robert Kennedy and his team to come to Samoa to investigate the safety of the vaccine,” wrote Sheldon Yett, then a UNICEF representative to the Pacific Islands, in an email dated May 22, 2019.

Two days later, senior U.S. Embassy official Antone Greubel wrote to Scott Brown, who was at the time Donald Trump’s U.S. ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, about Kennedy’s planned trip.

“The real reason Kennedy is coming is to raise awareness about vaccinations, more specifically some of the health concerns associated with vaccinating (from his point of view),” Greubel wrote in an email dated May 24, 2019.

Greubel noted in the email that an employee at the U.S. Embassy in Samoa, Benjamin Harding, had “played some role in a personal capacity” to bring Kennedy to Samoa. Greubel communicated that he had told Harding to “cease and desist from any further involvement” with Kennedy’s travel.

Measles had not been a serious problem in Samoa until 2018, when two infants died shortly after receiving an improperly prepared version of the measles vaccine. In an attempt to understand what happened, the nation suspended use of the measles vaccine—but even after it was approved to reenter the market, the jab had lost trust with the Samoan public. As a result, the island’s vaccination rate plummeted from the 60–70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones.

But within the folds of the vaccine pare-down, Kennedy and his anti-vax nonprofit Children’s Health Defense saw an opportunity: a chance to “measure health outcomes following the ‘natural experiment’ created by the respite from vaccines,” according to one of Kennedy’s 2021 blog posts.

After Kennedy’s visit, a massive measles outbreak hit the island.

Doctors from around the world traveled to Samoa to treat the virus surge, which resulted in 5,707 cases of measles. Ultimately, the widespread disease resulted in 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of 5.

Samoan officials would later blame the epidemic on Kennedy and his affiliates, arguing that his virulent vaccine skepticism had fueled the disease’s spread by empowering the voices and credibility of local anti-vaccine activists.

Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and the co-inventor of a rotavirus vaccine, told NBC News in January 2025 that he couldn’t imagine anything “less ethical or more cruel” than Kennedy’s plan to put children at risk of death in order to gather data for an unfounded study.

But Kennedy, nonetheless, played dumb before the U.S. Senate in January 2025 as he sat on the cusp of monumental power, claiming that it wasn’t clear if measles had even been the cause of death among Samoans that year.

“We don’t know what was killing them,” the soon-to-be health secretary asserted at the time.

Samoans didn’t agree.

“It’s a total fabrication,” Samoa’s director-general of health Dr. Alec Ekeroma told the Associated Press in February 2025, adding that Kennedy’s comments to U.S. senators were “a complete lie.”

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture—which for a long time included measles—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

Meanwhile, Kennedy is running DHS with practically zero relevant experience. He has not worked in medicine, public health, or the government—instead, he is guided only by a pocketful of conspiracies that America’s foremost health experts have already thoroughly debunked.

TrumpRx, the website launched by the Trump administration Thursday to sell discounted prescription drugs directly to consumers, is offering a whole lot less than advertised. 

The drugs offered on the site are all from brand-name manufacturers, making them more expensive than generic brands. Almost all of the drugs are also covered through insurance already. The product pages on the website even say, “If you have insurance, check your co-pay first—it may be even lower.”

One X user fact-checked Trump’s claim Thursday that TrumpRx will lower the cost of inhalers from $458 to $51. In reality, clicking on the link on TrumpRx redirects the user to the manufacturer’s website to see if the buyer qualifies for hardship discounts. As the user pointed out, these discounts are available regardless of whether TrumpRx is involved. 

Another X user pointed out that the lack of generic drugs on TrumpRx makes prices higher than on prescription comparison sites such as GoodRx.  

“There may be patients who think this is a good deal and then end up financially worse off,” Rachel Sachs, a law professor studying drug pricing at Washington University in St. Louis who advised the Biden administration on drug policy, told The New York Times. 

“TrumpRx is a sideshow,” said Sean D. Sullivan, a health economist at the University of Washington. “I consider it not a real, serious effort in service to lowering prescription drug prices for Americans.”