President Biden traveled Tuesday to New Orleans to announce the distribution of $150 million in grants as part of his “Cancer Moonshot” — after being ridiculed by former President Donald Trump for doing “nothing” to fulfill his 2020 campaign pledge to cure cancer, which Trump claimed he’d actually do.
Biden, 81, made the trip as he seeks to cement anti-cancer efforts as part of his legacy, even though the Moonshot’s signature initiative, an entity known as ARPA-H, has only dispensed $400 million over two years — compared to America’s nearly $200 billion annual cancer treatment costs.
The new funds include grants to eight research institutions — including Tulane University, where Biden spoke — to develop more precise technology to remove cancerous tissue.
“When I ran for president in 2020 I was determined to set up something called ARPA-H — Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health,” the retiring president said.
“There’s an outfit called DARPA, the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Project Agency, that drove breakthroughs and everything from the Internet to GPS and so much more … I wanted something that did nothing but focus on cancer.”
Biden said, “It’s all part of our goal of our Cancer Moonshot to end cancer as we know it and even cure some cancers. We’re mobilizing the whole of country effort to cut American cancer deaths in half … in 25 years.”
“This is on top of the administration investing more than $25 billion — I’ve been able to get money, $25 billion, for the National Cancer Institute. That’s an increase of more than $4 billion in just four years,” Biden said, apparently referring to the cumulative four-year bump.
The National Cancer Institute had $6.38 billion in annual funding in fiscal 2020, the final full year of Trump’s term of office, and the amount gradually increased to $7.22 billion in fiscal 2024 via bipartisan legislation.
However, that increase has not kept up with inflation, which surged more than 20% since Biden took office — meaning the Cancer Institute’s budget in terms of actual buying power has decreased.
Trump, the 78-year-old Republican presidential nominee, tore into Biden in his Republican convention speech last month for doing too little to spur cancer research.
“It’s America first. We will unleash the power of American innovation and as we do, we will soon be on the verge of finding the cures to cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and many other diseases. We’re going to get to the bottom of it,” Trump said in his nomination acceptance speech in Milwaukee.
“You remember this gentleman that I don’t want to mention [Biden] ... this man said, ‘We’re going to find the cure to cancer.’ Nothing happened. We’re going to get to the cure for cancer and Alzheimer’s and so many other things. We’re so close to doing something great, but we need a leader that will let it be done.”
Biden, who dropped out of his campaign for a second term on July 21 after a Democratic mutiny over his mental acuity and electability, said as a candidate in the 2020 election that “if I’m elected president, you’re going to see the single most important thing that changes in America is that we’re going to cure cancer.”
Biden’s so-called Moonshot has had a shoestring budget compared to other major undertakings.
Project Apollo, the program that sent astronauts to the moon, cost $318 billion in 2023 dollars, according to a Tax Foundation analysis — or roughly 800 times as much as has been spent so far on Biden’s Cancer Moonshot.
More recently, Trump’s administration poured $12.4 billion into Operation Warp Speech in 2020 to rapidly develop and deploy COVID-19 vaccines.
