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public health
Climate Action in Healthcare—No Capes Required
It's time for physicians to step up and join the climate fight. This is not just an environmental issue; it’s a public health issue.
Apr 28, 2026
April 28 is National Superhero Day. It’s a shame that Superman is fictional, because our planet needs saving from its most deadly threat: climate change. Our real heroes will come from science, not planet Krypton.
The threat of climate change is not theoretical, and neither are the health impacts. The Earth was 2.3°F warmer in 2024 than during the 20th-century average, and the 10 warmest recorded years have all taken place between 2015 and 2024. According to the World Health Organization, 3.6 billion people already live in areas highly vulnerable to climate change. Climate-driven deaths are rising, from heat illness and malnutrition to vector-borne disease and disasters such as flooding. Thirty-seven percent of heat-related deaths are linked to human-induced warming, a number expected to climb.
Yet at the very moment when the world needs bold climate action, the Trump administration has taken major steps backward. The United States, historically the world's largest emitter, pulled out of the Paris Agreement and failed to show at last year's United Nations Climate Change Conference, sending clear messages to international partners. Federal disinvestment has been staggering: The latest proposed federal budget will cut the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget by 52% and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's by 32%. Funding for climate change research has been gutted across major universities. We are not on track to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, a deadline scientists view as essential for planetary stability. This backslide disproportionately harms low-income communities, contributing to rising climate-related mortality.
Even as the US retreats from its international and domestic commitments to reduce emissions, America still has a league of planet defenders made up of scientists, engineers, and activists. They may not have capes, but their work saves lives.
No one is coming to save us, and while the impacts of climate change may feel distant to some healthcare providers, the rest of us cannot afford to sit this one out.
It's time for physicians to step up and join the fight. This is not just an environmental issue; it’s a public health issue. All the statistics about heatwaves, floods, and disasters aren’t just abstract; they’re at the bedside. We’re seeing the direct impacts of climate change in emergency medicine as it affects both the types of diseases we’re treating and how we deliver care.
As a physician myself, I know asking overworked healthcare providers to do more is, well, a big ask. But research shows that physicians are viewed as credible messengers on climate-related issues. Our voices and expertise matter, not just in clinics and operating rooms, but in our communities. We know that change does not just come in the form of lobbying and big communication campaigns. Often, it can come from everyday conversations. It can look like asking patients how they keep their medications cool during a heatwave or reviewing their asthma action plan in preparation for wildfire season. By leading with curiosity, we can help patients make the connection between their environment and its effect on their health.
It can take the form of a discussion with your colleagues about eco-friendly prescribing, like opting for tablets over liquid formulations or dry powders instead of propellant inhalers. Within our hospitals and clinics, we can make simple changes like adding recycling bins and minimizing the use of single-use disposables. Plastic waste is a huge problem in the medical field, but it’s a scalable problem within our control.
No one is coming to save us, and while the impacts of climate change may feel distant to some healthcare providers, the rest of us cannot afford to sit this one out. Joining the Justice League of climate change advocacy does not mean taking on everything; it means starting with doing something. The planet doesn’t need a superhero; it needs all of us to take a step toward changing our practice.
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Trump Joins the War on Cancer... on the Side of Cancer
Nothing can compare to the scale and breadth of Trump 2.0’s across-the-board evisceration of every part of the government that helps with cancer prevention and treatment.
Apr 23, 2026
Last week marked one year of me being cancer free. I’ve shared parts of the story of my excruciating recovery on a couple occasions. Still, it’s been truly surreal to embark on this journey back to health while being inundated with report after report of Trump administration policies that seem intent on increasing the suffering caused by cancer. Where normal governments seek to protect people through research, medical innovation, and funding for early treatment and prevention, this administration has slashed research into cancer, cut funding for medical care, and moved to relax standards on how much exposure to carcinogens companies are allowed to inflict on surrounding communities. This is, in short, a pro-cancer government.
Every administration has been guilty of taking actions that jeopardized public health, but there is simply nothing that can compare to the scale and breadth of Trump 2.0’s across-the-board evisceration of every part of the government that helps with cancer prevention and treatment. For half a century, the United States waged a War on Cancer. Since January 2025, it has instead waged war on cancer’s victims.
Cutting Cancer Research
The most obvious part of the Trump administration’s war on cancer patients is the frontal assault on research seeking to develop new screenings, treatments, and, hopefully, cures for an array of cancers.
On January 21, 2025, his first full day back in office, President Donald Trump imposed a bevy of restrictions on the National Institutes of Health (NIH), including functionally freezing external communications, grant review, and employee travel. By executive fiat, Trump and his right hand man-domestic policy puppet master Russell Vought delayed the disbursement of the NIH’s $47 billion in research funds, including $7 billion under the aegis of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). This consequently forced a pause on the review and approval of new clinical oncology trials. At the end of his second week in office, Trump mandated an instant 15% cap on NIH grant overhead, effectively demanding that the agency spend $4 billion less than planned. After freezing funding until the start of February, the NIH then began ruthlessly, frequently illegally (according to multiple federal court decisions) terminating grants; more than 1,800 were ended between February and June. And while courts have restored many of the improperly terminated grants, there’s a lot less recourse for new grants that are not being issued, leaving many research labs across the country, “running on fumes,” as The Washington Post described it. According to the Post’s analysis, NIH grants this year have fallen by over 50%.
The current suits in the White House would like you to believe the idea of a moonshot to treat cancer and the usage of words like “woman” in scientific research is more controversial than the erosion of decades of medical research and mass defunding of investment in curing one of the most omnipresent diseases in human history.
From the start of this term, the administration has also censored the production and dissemination of federal health research from agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the NIH. This includes illegally scrubbing swathes of publicly available data and web resources and requiring approval from the administration for CDC scientists to publish in external journals. The CDC mandated that no research publication was to use a list of supposedly “DEI” terms, including “LGBTQ” and “biologically female.” In other instances, any inclusion of the word “race,” “gender,” “sex,” “pregnancy,” or even “woman” was grounds for censorship. The result has been a chilling of important investigations that impact how we treat cancer; the type of tumor I had (called a carcinoid) occurs most often in older women.
The CDC, though, would not let a researcher publish that last sentence, if it had its way.
On April 1 2025, four NIH institute directors and another acting director were placed on leave. By late April, the chaos of a rampaging DOGE and mass layoffs had already forced out at least 2,500 staff (more than 10% of the agency’s 20,000 headcount) including two dozen of the 320 in-house research physicians at the NIH Clinical Center. After some of the internal administration restrictions were eased, researchers were still dealing with massive backlogs for basic lab equipment. That May, the administration sent a stop work order to the SMART IRB system, an NIH-funded initiative that streamlined institutional review board approval for clinical trials used by more than 1,300 institutions. A career researcher at NIH told Science that “however bad everyone on the outside thinks it is, it is a million times worse.”
All in all, the NIH has seen a proposed 44% funding cut, with the NCI facing a 37% cut. And it isn’t just NIH; there have been major reductions in cancer research funding from the Department of Defense and the Department of Veterans Affairs as well. A $1.5 billion Pentagon-directed health research grant fund, about half of which was devoted for cancer research, was slashed by 57%; funding for kidney, pancreatic, and lung cancer were zeroed out. At the VA, DOGE deployed an inaccurate data tool that terminated numerous grants, including one gene sequencing device that was being used to research cancer treatments.
According to STAT, the term “Cancer Moonshot” is now considered “controversial” at NIH, presumably because it was a Biden initiative. It’s difficult to imagine a more appropriate encapsulation of our ongoing reality: The current suits in the White House would like you to believe the idea of a moonshot to treat cancer and the usage of words like “woman” in scientific research is more controversial than the erosion of decades of medical research and mass defunding of investment in curing one of the most omnipresent diseases in human history.
Cuts, Not Cures
The war on cancer patients extends far beyond the scientific agencies. A number of agencies are also rolling back environmental and workplace safety regulations that protect us from cancer.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) alone is rolling back limits on a range of carcinogens including formaldehyde, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions (which include formaldehyde, nitrogen oxide, arsenic, sulfur, and other carcinogenic compounds), asbestos, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (also called PFAS or forever chemicals), and vinyl chloride. In a triumphant press release, the Trump EPA celebrated its moves to deregulate a host of chemicals, including dangerous air particulate (called PM 2.5), coal ash, and oil and gas wastewater, all of which are carcinogenic. The EPA also recertified Monsanto’s weedkiller Dicamba, which has been linked to higher risk of liver cancer and leukemia (and also banned twice by federal courts already). One of the chemical industry alums tapped to lead the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, Nancy Beck, is known for pushing for the rollback of bans on carcinogenic solvents. To top it all off, the agency is also down 25% of its staff, so it would be poorly positioned to enforce what standards survive the regulation purge.
Elsewhere, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has decimated the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), terminating 85% of its workforce. NIOSH conducted research on how exposure to dangerous chemicals impacted workers’ health, including studying cancer risk among miners and firefighters. The database tracking cancer in firefighters ended enrollment. NIOSH was instrumental in identifying now iconic toxic substances, including carcinogens like asbestos and ethylene oxide, and helping to develop federal workplace safety rules based on those findings.
Even students are being readily placed in harm’s way; the administration’s attack on clean energy programs has blocked school districts’ efforts to replace their diesel buses, and their cancer-causing exhaust, with electric ones. The Department of Interior has announced its intent to bring back the glory days of coal mining, despite coal exhaust spewing toxic air pollutants. To this end, the administration is exempting coal-fired power plants from upgraded air quality regulations. The administration has exempted around 100 industrial sites from Biden-era regulation of cancer-causing air pollutants.
Cartoonish Cruelty
Those are just two fronts in the federal government’s deeply disturbing war on cancer victims. Some 2 million Americans get cancer every year, with more than 600,000 dying from the disease. Thousands upon thousands more will be driven into both of those camps, from all of the policies I’ve mentioned and many, many more. Cuts to the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Food and Drug Administration’s Food Inspection Service, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which runs an air quality evaluation program that helps to apprise Americans of how safe it is to be outdoors for extended periods, leave all of us more in danger of facing cancer. Medicaid and Medicare cuts, the gutting of consumer protection bodies, and the revolving door with Big Pharma mean that we’ll pay more if we do.
Against this backdrop, the Trump administration sought to burnish its nonexistent cancer-busting image by announcing a $50 million initiative to deploy AI to fight pediatric cancer. The big shiny figure is really a drop in the bucket in terms of impact. Worse, its part and parcel of the White House’s naked embrace of the AI-hype that is driving an industrial buildout that itself causes cancer.
The only logical conclusion to glean from the simultaneous destruction of cancer research, ripping up of the rules and agencies that protect us from it, and willful zeal for fossil fuels (often wrapped up with AI-mania via the data center build out) and exempting them from air quality oversight is that this is a pro-cancer administration. They admitted as much when news broke before Trump was even inaugurated that his EPA would no longer tally the human cost of air pollution.
Whether it’s counted or not, though, it is there. The type of cancer I had is a “mild” one; I still lost a lung, had a vocal cord paralyzed, spent months barely able to get through a day, and still get winded easily. The official position of the US government appears to be that more people should have to endure that.
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Citing Child Cancer Risk, Lawsuit Targets Trump EPA Over Glyphosate
"The EPA's silence leaves families in the dark and falls far short of its responsibility to protect public health," said the Environmental Working Group's president.
Apr 21, 2026
Just days before the US Supreme Court is set to hear arguments related to glyphosate's health risks, the Environmental Working Group on Tuesday sued the Trump administration for unlawfully delaying its response to an EWG petition seeking stronger restrictions on "the most widely used herbicide in the United States and globally."
The filing at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit calls out the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for failing to act on evidence that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Monsanto's Roundup, "is exposing infants and young children to harmful levels through everyday foods."
EWG and its co-petitioners filed a formal administrative petition under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in 2018, during President Donald Trump's first term, and amended it the following year. They want the EPA to revoke or modify the glyphosate policy for oats, so it's stricter, and restrict its use as a pre-harvest drying agent.
"Congress required EPA to ensure that pesticide residues in food are safe, with particular protection for children," the new filing states. "Yet, more than seven years after being presented with substantial scientific evidence that the current tolerance for glyphosate in oats may not meet that standard, EPA has failed to make any final, reviewable determination."
EWG president and co-founder Ken Cook declared in a Tuesday statement that "parents shouldn't have to second-guess whether everyday foods like cereal and snack bars are putting their children at risk of cancer."
"The EPA's silence leaves families in the dark and falls far short of its responsibility to protect public health," he continued. "It's time for the agency to stop stalling and do its job."
The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as "probably carcinogenic" to humanity over a decade ago, while the EPA has repeatedly claimed that it is not likely to cause cancer in humans despite mounting research, the recent retraction of a landmark study on the pesticide's supposed safety, and legal battles between patients and Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018.
Next week, the nation's top court is set to hear arguments in a case that, as EWG warned Tuesday, "could have sweeping implications for whether farmers and consumers can keep pursuing lawsuits for harms linked to glyphosate, and whether states can require warning labels on glyphosate products."
The Wall Street Journal noted Monday that while the company continues to insist on glyphosate's safety, it "wants anyone with a claim to join the settlement" negotiated with a team of lawyers representing around 40,000 claimants that "would bring Bayer's total price tag to resolve the Roundup litigation to roughly $22 billion."
Despite Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s campaign promise to "Make America Healthy Again," the administration has notably sided with Bayer in the case before the Supreme Court, and the president in February even issued an executive order mandating the production of glyphosate.
"If anyone still wondered whether 'Make America Healthy Again' was a genuine commitment to protecting public health or a scam concocted by President Trump and RFK Jr. to rally health-conscious voters in 2024, today's decision answers that question," Cook said at the time. "It's a shocking betrayal to all of us but especially the people who live and work near farm fields where glyphosate is used."
Still, EWG is plowing ahead with its legal action, arguing that "the EPA has a clear legal duty to act on this petition, and it has simply refused to do so," as the group's general counsel and COO, Caroline Leary, put it. "This kind of delay has real consequences for families who rely on the agency to ensure children are not exposed to toxic farm chemical residues like glyphosate."
"This is exactly the kind of situation where courts are meant to step in," Leary added. "The EPA cannot avoid its responsibilities simply by doing nothing."
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