Not all of us are aware of the amounts of money that the U.S. government spends on cancer research. I did a little Googling and came up with some numbers that some people will find surprising.
One big dispensary of government funding is the Department of Defense (DoD) Prostate Cancer Research Program (PCRP). I know about that because I participated in it as a "consumer reviewer", i.e., a prostate cancer patient who gets to read research proposals and put in comments and evaluation from a non-scientist, non-doctor point of view. For 2019, PCRP has a budget of $100 million for prostate cancer research and has spent $1.72 billion over the years since 1997. This is money that is allocated as grants, almost all to universities and research institutes, for prostate cancer research. Often it is funding part of a research project that also has other funds. The prostate cancer research program is one part of the DoD health research work that extends to many other cancers and other diseases.
See: cdmrp.army.mil/pcrp/ for more info about PCRP.
The National Cancer Institute has a significantly larger program. I downloaded a spreadsheet from their website listing all of their projects for Fiscal Year 2017. It showed the following:
Prostate cancer research: 876 projects $233+ million.
Total cancer research (all cancers): 8477 projects, $5.636+ billion dollars.
See: cancer.gov/about-nci/budget
And: fundedresearch.cancer.gov/n...
Many of us worry that the big pharmaceutical companies aren't funding potentially important research because it won't make money for them. I worry about that too. It's a problem that needs to be addressed. My own view is that capitalism offers some real incentives to solve important problems and that big pharma has a valuable role to play, but I think we need more regulation to reduce incentives for research on "me too" drugs (e.g., yet another leuprolide) and increase incentives for truly new solutions - but that's a different topic with lots of issues to consider.
However, even without much help from big pharma, we are getting lots of research done via government support. Fortunately, both Republicans and Democrats get all the same diseases and medical research is popular with, and supported by, people in both parties.
Alan