The news is unremittingly bad when it comes to federal funding for U.S. science in general and medical science in particular.

The Trump regime’s attempt to impose political controls over research funding will affect every branch of government that relies on grants to outsiders for properly researched information to guide their decision-making. A federal rule, now under consideration by the Office of Management and Budget, would give the Trump regime’s political commissars the right to veto any grant that doesn’t meet their ideological agenda. The rule has drawn hundreds of thousands of protest comments from scientists, professional societies, research groups and the general public.

The news is especially disturbing when it comes to health care, the subject of this Substack.

KFF Health News reported today that the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has effectively been shut down, awarding just 4.5% of the $345 million Congress appropriated for an agency that is "estimated to have saved thousands of lives and billions of dollars over the past 27 years by improving medical practice.” About 75 percent of its staff has left since January 2025.

AHRQ’s major focus over the years has been hospital safety and flaws in the medical delivery system. “When you think about everything Americans hate about our healthcare system — that it costs too much, that you can’t get in to see a physician, that the treatment isn’t right, that the records contain wrong information — all that is what AHRQ studies,” said Dr. Aaron Carroll, chief executive of AcademyHealth, a health services research group, many of whose members depend on AHRQ grants.

Becker’s Hospital Review reported on the latest broadside in the Health and Human Services Department’s attack on all research involving genetic manipulation aimed at changing an organism’s behavior — so-called gain-of-function research. A July 20 guideline essentially ended funding for such research if it were deemed dangerous, a decision that will be left up to political appointees when the new science overlord rule goes into effect.

The American Society for Microbiology points out that there are major legitimate uses for gain-of-function research. It has been helpful in developing new therapies for cancer, cystic fibrosis, diabetes and cardiac pacemaker repair; developing vaccines for coronavirus and dengue fever; and developing treatments for bacterial infections affecting crops, a rising concern in an age of rapid global warming. The paper notes that experiments raising biosafety concerns are “an extremely small subset” of the field.

A new report from the Kaiser Family Foundation documents the decimation of U.S. support for HIV prevention and treatment around the world. Total funding from all donor countries declined by $2.1 billion or 25% in 2025 from the previous year. It was the lowest level of donor government support since 2007. All of the decline was due to sharp cutbacks by the Trump regime during its first year in office.

“Congress has continued to appropriate funding for HIV at steady levels, meaning that additional funding remains in the U.S. pipeline, although the extent to which those funds will be fully spent remains uncertain,” the report noted.Meanwhile, Anthony Fauci, the former head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, used the fifth amendment’s protection against self-incrimination to refuse to answer any question posed by Sen. Rand Paul (D-KY) at his oversight committee hearing this morning. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Fox News over the weekend that “if he lies again, he could be subject to perjury prosecution.”

Paul apparently leaked Fauci’s diaries that had been subpoenaed by his subcommittee. Besides the unflattering self-aggrandizing comments contained in the diary, which have received substantial media attention, there were a few statements that indicated Fauci believed there should be further investigation of the theory that the COVID-19 pandemic was started by an escaped virus from a Chinese lab doing gain-of-function research on coronaviruses with U.S. grants. He later dismissed this theory.

Paul also attacks Fauci for endorsing the Covid-era lockdowns, which Paul claims cost more lives than the virus itself. This claim has been repeatedly debunked in the medical literature. One early study showed that the lives lost due to economic lockdowns totaled a maximum of a quarter of a million, while lives saved with the lockdowns could have been as high as 1.7 million. The minimums in the estimates were 60,000 and 866,000 respectively.

“The Covid lockdown, however, could never have been inflicted without you aiding and abetting the crime,” Paul said at the opening of the hearing. When Fauci’s lawyer attempted to make a statement, he was ejected from the hearing room. “There will be repercussions to your refusal to testify today,” the senator told Fauci.

According to Stat News, Gary Peters (D-MI), the ranking member of the committee, opened the hearing by calling the legitimacy of Paul’s efforts into question, saying the oversight efforts were not bipartisan as usual. He said the pandemic response was only being relitigated to support “a pre-determined conclusion that was reached years ago.”