Lives in the balance: Kansas City’s top cancer researchers worry about federal funding cuts doing lasting damage

Suzanne King | 11.3.25

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. 

This year that typically routine report, known in research jargon as a noncompeting renewal, was repeatedly rewritten. Triggering words targeted by the Trump administration had to be eliminated before a $2.8 million allocation was finally funneled to the cancer center in mid-September, two months later than expected.

“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%.

“NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health,” the administration wrote in its budget proposal. And the NSF proposed budget, it said, “cuts funding for: climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences; and programs in low priority areas of science.”

But top scientists warn that the new priorities mean that rather than unraveling mysteries about devastating diseases and looking for cures, scientists are spending time trying to claw back lost funding, stop future losses and, like the cancer center’s experience, parse words in grant applications to avoid upsetting the bureaucrats in charge.

“This is not productive,” Jensen said during a recent interview in his office on the KU Medical Center campus in Kansas City.

“Most people in my shoes have always operated under the assumption that the people of the United States and the United States government believed that supporting biomedical research and trying to find cures for all of these god-awful, terrible diseases was an important part of this country’s makeup,” he said. “That idea is now being tested.”

Terminated and frozen grants

According to Grant Witness, a scientist-run project tracking the fate of research grants, 5,464 NIH grants and 1,978 NSF grants have been terminated since Trump returned to office. Of those, 2,860 NIH grants and 617 NSF grants may have been reinstated. 

But financial losses are adding up nonetheless. Grant Witness calculates that grants listed as terminated or frozen across both agencies had almost $3 billion in funds committed by the government but not yet spent.

It has tracked 65 NIH or NSF grants in Missouri and Kansas that have been terminated. Of those, five have been reinstated. That amounts to lost grant funding of $30.5 million in Missouri and $7.66 million in Kansas. 

In some cases, the Trump administration froze funding for entire institutions, including Harvard University. But scientists across the country — regardless of where they work — have been affected.

In a July report, The Center for American Progress found that the Trump administration had plans to eliminate 4,000 grants — in addition to those terminated or frozen — at more than 600 institutions. The grants, worth some $6.9 billion, were spread across every state.

Grants that fund research on topics the administration finds objectionable, such as gender, race or climate change, have been cut. Others that only appear to be related to one of the banned topics have been caught up in the disruption, too.

Meanwhile, major staffing reductions at the federal grant-making agencies have slowed the flow of money.

As a result, universities and research institutions don’t know what funding to rely on. Some are preemptively cutting staff or reducing the number of graduate students they are admitting. And looming over all of the uncertainty is the ongoing federal government shutdown, and the threat of additional budget cuts to research agencies once Congress finally passes a spending plan.

“It’s an incredibly muddled situation and an enormously disruptive one,” said Noam Ross, a computational researcher who co-founded Grant Witness. “There are a lot of projects that have a very ambiguous state at the moment.”

Uncertainty across academia

Like many institutions, the KU Cancer Center received word earlier this year about grants that would be terminated. The center counts on the federal government for about half of its $80 million annual budget.

Those notices caused research delays and stress among researchers.

“For the first few months of this administration, it wasn’t quite clear how all of this was going to shake out,” Jensen said. “People were still kind of dumbfounded by a lot of the things that were happening.”

Grant terminations were being sent and later rescinded, like a $2 million NIH grant awarded to Jannette Berkley-Patton, a University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine professor. The grant, which had $688,000 in remaining funds, supports a project attempting to increase COVID-19 testing and treatment by partnering with African American churches.

Other grants were being canceled altogether, like a $1.4 million NIH grant to the University of Missouri-Columbia that funded research into the effect of e-cigarette policies on youth tobacco use. The three-year grant was canceled after one year, with about $600,000 unspent.

Michael Pesko, the professor who oversees the graduate student who won the grant, said his lab scraped together money for the student to continue the research for one more year. After that, he said, the student will have to find another funding source.

“Somewhat paradoxically, maybe from the perspective of the people canceling the grant,” Pesko said, “the work he was doing supported government deregulation and supported that e-cigarettes are overregulated.”

And, as with the cancer center’s grant renewal, many organizations and researchers are experiencing delays in funding. Pesko said the annual allotment for one of his primary grants didn’t come through until four months after the new funding year started.

“It’s obviously really stressful,” he said. “It’s hard to spend money that you don’t know is there or not.”

In addition to existing grants being canceled or delayed, fewer new federal research grants are moving through the pipeline, which experts said will have long-term consequences. 

Grant reviews known as study sections — a critical step required before funds are awarded — have at times ground to a halt under the new administration. And other grants that have already been reviewed and rated remain languishing and unfunded.

That’s the case for a grant application submitted by Joan Lewis-Wambi, associate professor of cancer biology at the KU Cancer Center. Lewis-Wambi is studying triple negative breast cancer in African American women, and wants to investigate if a protein more prolific in that population is related to the disease. 

Her grant received top marks when it went through the grant review process, which means it is considered research funding that should be prioritized. But the grant is still waiting to be funded.

Any other year, the money would be in place and research would be well underway, Jensen said. The reason for the current delay is unclear. But Jensen can’t help but wonder if it’s been flagged because of the population involved in the research.

“Is that research allowed?” he said. “Unclear.”

A talent drain

Ultimately the gaps in the grant pipeline will impede progress in treating a host of diseases and answering other scientific questions, said Dr. Elena Fuentes-Afflick, chief scientific officer with the American Association of Medical Colleges. 

“We know that it is damaging,” she said, “because that means that good ideas are not being reviewed for funding. … It slows everything down.”

Anywhere near a 40% reduction in NIH funding, as Trump’s budget proposal suggests, would do lasting damage, said Dr. Ronald Chen, a radiology oncologist who works at the University of Kansas but spoke in his capacity as an individual researcher.

“It will definitely impact bringing new treatments to patients,” he said. “It will impact patient survival. It will impact cure rates for patients in the future.”

Chen is leading a national trial of a drug to treat Stage 4 prostate cancer. It will enroll 600 patients across the country and has funding from the National Cancer Institute.

“If this trial were positive,” Chen said, “it will change the standard of care for Stage 4 prostate cancer.”

But if NIH funding were drastically cut, he’s not sure how much the trial would accomplish.

Chen also worries about what federal funding cuts will mean to his students and young researchers, like his son, a senior in high school, who dreams of being an academic researcher. 

Scientists just starting out and students looking for a career may see new restrictions and funding reductions as reasons to pursue a different career. Already, many are looking for positions overseas.

Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, president and chief scientific officer with Kansas City’s Stowers Institute, echoed that concern.

“The broader impact goes well beyond budgets,” he said in an email response to questions. “Scientists, particularly early-career researchers, are feeling the pressure. … There’s a palpable risk of talent drain, with young scientists increasingly exploring opportunities abroad in search of stable support and creative freedom.”

New funding priorities could also reduce the amount of basic research being done, which risks missing out on game-changing breakthroughs. Basic research simply explores, without the goal of creating a treatment or advancing an existing theory. And it can lead to unexpected discoveries and breakthroughs, Sánchez Alvarado said. 

But that research will be severely limited if government funding doesn’t support it.

“When early-career scientists feel compelled to adjust their research to survive funding cycles, creative exploration is discouraged,” he said. “The risk is that researchers invest their energy in predictable, incremental projects rather than bold explorations with the potential for game-changing results.”

That’s what happened when scientists undertook work investigating the immune system. Cellular therapeutics, which help the body’s own cells fight cancer, is a recent advance in treatment of certain cancers. Now the therapy, being studied closely at the KU Cancer Center, is treating cancers that would have been deadly before it came along.

“As it turns out,” Jensen said, “that fundamental research has been critical to many of the exciting developments in cancer treatment, particularly over the last 10 years.”

‘She didn’t have a chance in hell’

Jensen is well aware of the progress that’s been made understanding and treating cancer over the span of his career.

He will never forget a young patient he saw in 1983, his third year of medical school. 

In the late summer, she had a melanoma on her arm that was concerning, but not life threatening. By spring, the aggressive skin cancer had spread throughout her body. 

“She didn’t have a chance in hell,” Jensen said.

The prognosis could have been quite different had that patient needed treatment today. Four decades of biomedical research have brought about treatments — and cures — for what used to be some of the most deadly cancer diagnoses.

“I’ve seen patients just like her literally be rescued from the jaws of death and go on to do just fine,” Jensen said. “But back then, she didn’t have any hope whatsoever.”

For Jensen, the memory is a poignant illustration of why the Trump administration’s plans to slash the federal government’s investment in scientific research is a threat to that progress.

“Yes, (taxpayers) have invested significant resources in what we do,” Jensen said. “But we have brought the receipts. And the receipts are, since 1991, cancer mortality has dropped by a third. That’s incredibly impressive. That’s historic. It’s stunning how much improvement there has been.”

Jensen came to KU in 2004, eight years before the university’s cancer center finally gained status as a National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center and 18 years before it gained the institute’s comprehensive designation. 

Fred Logan, a retired Johnson County lawyer who has been a key supporter of the cancer center from its earliest days, said he doesn’t think people understand what’s at stake when federal dollars are taken away from research institutions. 

“Cancer research that’s been done in this country has been so incredibly successful,” he said, “the thought just hadn’t occurred to me that there would be a proposal to cut funding to the National Cancer Institute.”

In the early days of KU’s quest to gain NCI designation, Logan led a campaign to pass a one-eighth-cent county sales tax to help fund the cancer center. That Johnson County Education Research Triangle tax brings in more than $15 million annually that is split between the cancer center, the KU Edwards Campus and Kansas State University’s Johnson County campus. 

It passed overwhelmingly in 2008, at the depth of the Great Recession, in large part, Logan believes, because voters wanted to have better cancer care at home.

Too many people had watched loved ones board planes to travel to far-away cancer centers when they got sick. They wanted the Kansas City area to have closer access to clinical trials and cutting-edge treatments.

Perhaps for similar reasons, the cancer center has attracted $467 million in philanthropic support for its research since 2004.

Logan, who recently traveled to Washington, D.C., to ask lawmakers not to cut federal research dollars in the next budget, said he thinks people still support the investment.

“I think voters would be astonished if they fully comprehended the magnitude of the cuts that have been proposed,” Logan said.

Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas, who sits on the Senate appropriations committee, said in a statement he remains committed to maintaining “robust federal investments in cancer research.” That means fully funding NIH, he said.

“Because of the dedicated work of KU Cancer Center’s leadership, scientists, doctors and researchers,” Moran’s statement said, “each day we are closer to new treatments, and one day, the cure to cancer.”

In May, the University of Kansas and the KU Health System broke ground on the cancer center’s new $450 million home. The 675,000-square-foot complex, tucked behind the northwest corner of State Line Road and 39th Street, will put all of the research done at the cancer center and the cancer care offered through the health system in one location. 

The new facility has been funded so far through federal and state support and private donations, including a $10 million grant from the Bloch Family Foundation and Linda Lyon, and a $100 million gift from the Sunderland Foundation.

In some ways its opening at the end of 2027 will be a manifestation of the progress the cancer center has seen since Jensen first arrived two decades ago. He plans to retire once the new campus is complete.

Jensen is hopeful that Congress will block the Trump administration’s threatened cuts. He believes the worst scenario, a 40% cut, would destroy the future of cancer research and he thinks it will be avoided. But he’s not naive about what has already been lost.

In addition to the billions of grant funding lost, the political intrusion in scientific research will leave a lasting stain, he said.

“They’ve inserted political appointees into the NIH to oversee the work product of study sections to ensure that the grants that scored the highest align with the political priority,” Jensen said. “That’s been done before in some very scary circumstances. 

“It’s called fascism.”