
WASHINGTON — Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health, chaired a meeting at the White House on Monday that many research advocates viewed as a chance to oppose the $5.8 billion cut President Trump has proposed for the agency next year.
Yet the topic of possible reductions in federal research funding, by Collins’ account, did not come up.
“We didn’t get into that kind of specifics,” Collins told STAT as he left the West Wing. “We talked about the promise of biomedical research. It was a great conversation between the private-sector representatives and academics and government about how this ecosystem [of federal and private funding] is so critical for the future.”