I’ve spent the last month enjoying the privilege of tending my adorable 3-year old granddaughter, Lana. Unfortunately, the reason I was tending her was anything but enjoyable; it was heartbreaking. Her mother has aggressive, rapidly spreading, invasive cancer that will need every treatment: emergency chemotherapy, surgery, radiation and hormonal therapy for years, if she is lucky. Three families’ lives have been shattered. It is impossible to hide from Lana that something is terribly wrong. She asked, “Is Mommy going to die?”
It is also impossible to hide that something is also terribly wrong with this country. Between DOGE, Donald Trump’s executive orders and the bill passed by Congressional Republicans (supported by Utah’s entire delegation), the health of all Americans is being sacrificed. For multiple reasons, Trump and Republican members of Congress are ensuring that the tragic cancer saga now dominating my family’s future will be striking millions more in years to come.
One in two women and one in three men will get cancer in their lifetime. Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the U.S., claiming 600,000 American lives a year. By the 1970s, experts had concluded that 80% of cancer is caused by environmental exposures — carcinogens that we eat, smoke, breathe, swallow or absorb.
The incidence of 14 different cancers is rising among those between the ages of 15 and 49. In women under 50, cancer rates are 82% higher than in males. And young people are getting more aggressive cancers that are growing more quickly and have a worse prognosis. In young adults, symptoms are more likely to be dismissed, resulting in later, less treatable stages when diagnosed. Environmental factors are most likely to blame because the remaining culprit, genetics, doesn’t change that much over a generation.
The White House and Congress have poured the foundation to create more cancer victims. Among the environmental causes of cancer, air pollution is certainly prominent. It even decreases the rates of survival in cancer patients like Lana’s mother. Get ready to breathe more air pollution wherever you live, because EPA director Lee Zeldin has fired hundreds of pollution scientists and is proposing to roll back at least 31 clean air regulations. He’s weakening and/or delaying drinking water standards for “forever chemicals,” chemicals so toxic that the previous EPA ruled essentially no amount is safe. These chemicals are linked to multiple cancers. Zeldin is also easing restrictions on cancer-causing pesticides.
Trump’s bill forces taxpayers to prop up all types of dirty energy while gutting clean energy. Of course, fossil fuel combustion is the main driver of the climate crisis, and this White House seems committed to pretending that doesn’t exist. They just shuttered the website hosting the National Climate Assessment, the most comprehensive source of information about how the climate crisis affects the United States. Air pollution from multiple sources will increase due to global warming. Ozone, dust, drought and the plague of wildfires, the most toxic type of air pollution, will steadily worsen, all of which will increase cancer rates.
The U.S. has led the world in cancer research for decades, thanks to federal funding. Trump has brought that pre-eminence crashing down, wiping out or delaying nearly 2,500 National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants, including a nearly 40% funding cut at the National Cancer Institute, NIH’s crown jewel, eliminating research for cancer treatments and cures. Even research delays kill people, because rapidly dividing cancer cells don’t take orders from Donald Trump. “U.S. cancer research might never recover,” reads one headline in the premier medical journal The Lancet.
Up to 20 million people will soon lose Medicaid or Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage, which will damage healthcare and increase costs for everyone else. Rural hospitals will close and others will struggle financially. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rule changes will throw another 2 million people off the ACA; people like my son, who’s in the age group where cancer is spiking. Losing health insurance decreases your chance of getting cancer diagnosed and treated in time.
Shuttering cancer research, releasing more carcinogens and denying Americans health care are all manifestations of a different kind of cancer: an ideological cancer of cruelty brewed up by Donald Trump, but now institutionalized by Congress. There will be millions of victims of that cruelty — victims who are not just abstractions or statistics, but victims with human faces. They are real people like Lana, her mother and my family.
Utahns like to think we are good examples of generosity, compassion and moral behavior. If so, we should expect that of our Congressional delegation. If you feel the same, call their offices and ask them to set that example to their colleagues and reverse these cruel public policies. Protecting all of us from cancer shouldn’t be political.