Pediatric Cancer Bill is Good News That Still Hurts

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The Bulwark

News, Society & Culture, Politics, News Commentary

4.7 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2025

⏱️ 14 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sam Stein highlights 16-year-old cancer patient Mikaela Naylon, who spent her final days lobbying Congress for the Give Kids a Chance Act, helping revive the long-stalled pediatric cancer research bill, with her story inspiring new momentum and raising cautious optimism it could finally pass.

Sam's piece from September 2025, "Elon Musk Torpedoed a Beloved Pediatric Cancer Bill. It’s Yet to Recover.": https://www.thebulwark.com/p/elon-musk-pediatric-cancer-bill-congressional-inertia-give-kids-a-chance

Sam's piece from December 2024, "Elon Killed the Budget Deal. Cancer Research for Kids Was Collateral Damage.": https://www.thebulwark.com/p/elon-musk-killed-budget-deal-children-cancer-funding-collateral-damage

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, everyone. It's me, Sam Stein. It's Friday afternoon when I'm recording this, and I wanted to do this because there's a piece of video I want to provide you guys that is, like, incredibly complex. It's complex because it's both deeply, deeply sad, and I'm going to try to hold it together through the video, but also
0:22.3	one of the rarest signs of positive movement that I can recall over the past year. You might be
0:32.5	wondering what the hell are you talking about. But let me start back a year ago because I've told this story before.
0:40.8	About a year ago, before Donald Trump took office, the United States Congress was
0:46.6	passing a end-of-the-year funding bill.
0:49.7	And if you remember, there was a lot of commotion because at the time, even though Donald Trump wasn't in
0:55.9	office, Elon Musk railed against that funding bill because he thought it was deeply wasteful.
1:03.6	And at the last minute, Republicans in Congress decided to essentially yank the bill, even
1:09.9	though it had been an agreement.
1:11.3	And they cut out all these provisions to make it just this kind of finite continuing resolution.
1:18.8	Among the provisions that we focused on at the time were a series of reforms and investments
1:26.4	in pediatric cancer treatments and research.
1:31.0	One of those provisions got saved, and I did a video, God, it must have been almost 12
1:38.2	months ago, celebrating that moment because it was a remarkable thing to see even that stuff get saved.
1:45.8	But a couple of the other provisions did not get saved.
1:49.0	One of those was called the Give Kids a Chance Act.
1:52.2	So the Give Kids a Chance Act, and look, I'm not a doctor, so I don't want to like pretend to be.
1:57.5	But basically, it changed a bunch of the regulations around how the FDA authorizes
2:04.2	treatments for pediatric cancer research, combination drug therapies. It gives the agency the
2:11.4	authority to compel pharmaceutical companies to study the efficacy of those combination therapies.
2:18.0	Among the people in the field, and this is what's most important to know, among the people in the
2:22.1	field, this is like a big deal. Kids cancer treatments are not something that gets a lot of
	...

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