By Charles Young, WV News
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (WV News) — Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., promised to safeguard federal dollars for health care funding and research during an event in Morgantown Tuesday.
Capito, addressing attendees of the Focus Forward conference, said she will work to prevent proposed cuts to the budget of the U.S. National Institutes of Health.
“I’m not going to stand to have the research and innovation suffer,” she said. “I’m not going to be a party to anything that reduces our ability to research and innovate as a country. Because if we don’t, other countries will.”
According to recent reporting from The Washington Post and other outlets, the Trump administration has proposed cutting around 44% of the NIH budget for Fiscal Year 2026 and plans to reorganize and consolidate some of its institutes and centers.
In 2024, the WVU Cancer Institute launched an effort to become recognized as the 73rd cancer center in the nation to be awarded an official designation from the NIH’s National Cancer Institute.
It remains to be seen how the administration’s planned cuts could impact the Cancer Institute’s designation, Capito said, but she remains hopeful.