Donald Trump’s vindictiveness is putting Americans health at risk
Universities are one of the central pillars of medical research, particularly for basic science and early-stage discoveries.
A useful way to think about it is:
Universities discover → government funds much of the basic research → hospitals test → companies develop and commercialize.
Where universities matter most
Type of research
The U.S. university system is particularly important
Many of America’s leading medical research institutions are university-affiliated:
Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, Yale, Columbia
They operate enormous research laboratories and, importantly, are connected to teaching hospitals, giving researchers access to patients and clinical data.
Government funding is crucial
Universities don’t generally pay for all this research themselves. The NIH is a major source of funding. NIH funding supports researchers at universities and medical institutions throughout the country.
This is important because basic research often doesn’t have an obvious commercial payoff. A university laboratory might spend 10–20 years understanding a biological mechanism before a pharmaceutical company can turn that knowledge into a drug.
Universities and pharmaceutical companies play different roles
A simplified example:
University laboratory
→ discovers a new protein involved in cancer
Biotech/pharmaceutical company
→ develops the drug, conducts large clinical trials and obtains FDA approval
NIH
→ funds years of research to understand it
University/medical center
→ develops an experimental treatment
Hospitals/doctors
→ administer it to patients
So when we say that the United States leads the world in medical research, a substantial part of that leadership comes from the extraordinary combination of universities + NIH + teaching hospitals + biotechnology + pharmaceutical companies.
One particularly interesting point is that universities are disproportionately important to the earliest and riskiest stages of medical discovery, while industry becomes increasingly important as a discovery moves toward an approved product.
And now you have Trump who doesn’t like the liberal orientation of some universities and is employing his usual tactics of bullying and revenge risking your health.
One of Harvard University’s biggest federal funding streams is down sharply, according to a New York Times analysis of government data.
The declines have persisted even after a federal judge forced the Trump administration to reverse drastic cuts to the university last year.
The funding, from the National Institutes of Health, currently lags about 18 percent behind the average pace of grants during the Biden administration, the analysis shows.
Last year, Harvard successfully sued the Trump administration, after the government announced it had frozen more than $2.2 billion in 2025, from multiple federal agencies.
But unlike then, when Trump officials made a public spectacle out of announcing the cuts, the N.I.H. is mainly delaying, reducing or rejecting grant requests, often leaving researchers and university leaders in the dark about what is happening.
The reduction appears to be the latest front in the Trump administration’s on-again, off-again war with Harvard and other elite universities. It is a new, more subtle tactic that is harder to fight in court, but that could be just as damaging if cuts and uncertainty build. Source: New York Times
QUINNSCOMMENTARY 