After axing billions in biomedical research grants and pulling the plug on a pediatric brain tumor consortium, the federal government has announced plans to double funding for an artificial-intelligence-driven data effort for kids with cancer.
The Trump administration has upped the budget for the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI's) “Childhood Cancer Data Initiative” from $50 million to $100 million, according to a Sept. 30 release.
The program launched under President Donald Trump’s first term and is designed to “collect, generate and analyze” childhood cancer data. The budget boost is supposed to help advance the development of better diagnostics, treatments and prevention strategies, the release reads.
The effort will use AI to gather information from electronic health records and claims data to guide research and clinical trial design. The program will also include external participation from unnamed private-sector partners, according to the release.
The $100 million pledge is central to Trump’s new executive order, titled “Unlocking Cures for Pediatric Cancer with Artificial Intelligence,” that was also published yesterday.
According to the order, one of the main goals Trump has tasked the Make America Healthy Again Commission with is reversing the incidence of pediatric cancer deaths.
“For years we’ve been amassing data about childhood cancer, but until now we’ve been unable to fully exploit this trove of information and apply it to practical medicine,” Trump said yesterday in a White House briefing posted on X. “Using cutting-edge AI, we will empower scientists and researchers to discover new treatments, cures and prevention strategies.
“AI can also make groundbreaking trials and therapies,” the president continued. “It's just going to be so accessible to everybody—families all over the country. It’s going to be amazing.”
“I cannot think of a better way to begin my tenure at NCI than to redouble our efforts to support our youngest patients and their families facing rare leukemias and other cancers,” freshly tapped NCI Director Anthony Letai, M.D., Ph.D., said in the release. “We will not stop until childhood cancer is a thing of the past.”
The administration is calling the additional $50 million a “funding surge.” However, the money pales in comparison to the billions Trump has proposed to cut from the National Institutes of Health—where the NCI is housed—and the funding the administration has already pulled or frozen.
At the end of August, the NCI announced the end of its support for a 26-year-old push to advance clinical trials for children with brain tumors.
Earlier this year, Trump proposed cutting $18 billion from the NIH’s budget for the 2026 fiscal year, although the Senate has outlined plans that resist his 40% reduction. Most recently, NIH had an annual budget of nearly $48 billion, making the agency the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.
Since the start of Trump’s second term, his administration has axed more than 3,500 research grants for scientists across the country, according to a compilation project by Grant Witness.
Overall, it’s estimated that the NIH has slashed $12 billion in research funding under Trump’s most recent administration. The grant terminations are said to be for science that doesn’t align with the president’s executive orders, which declare that the U.S. government only recognizes two sexes and demand that diversity efforts are dismantled.
The White House has also gutted the federal healthcare workforce, including members of the NCI. Excluding the past week, the Department of Health and Human Services has already lost roughly 20,000 employees since Trump took office in January.
More recently, over 150,000 federal workers across all departments have reportedly resigned amid the threat of a now-occurring government shutdown. The resignations are part of Trump’s buyout program that kept employees receiving paychecks through September.
The federal departures are the nation’s largest mass resignation in almost a century.