President Donald Trump appeared to claim credit today for a record drop in cancer death rates that occurred the year he took office. Scientists say lower smoking rates, earlier detection and better drugs are responsible for a steady decline in cancer deaths since 1991.

The president, who unsuccessfully advocated cutting $4.5 billion from the NIH budget last year, tweeted that U.S. cancer death rates are the lowest in recorded history, adding there is “a lot of good news coming out of this Administration.”

The U.S. cancer death rate dropped 2.2 percent in 2017 compared with 2016, a record decline that was part of a 29 percent overall drop in the cancer death rate since 1991, the American Cancer Society reported Wednesday. That translates to about 3 million fewer cancer deaths in the past three decades.

Better cancer screening and prevention techniques, as well as a new generation of drugs that target specific proteins in tumors, have vastly improved survival rates for diseases like lung and skin cancer. Several of those drugs were approved by the FDA in 2014 and 2015, well before Trump’s presidency.

Experts also point to declining smoking rates, particularly among youth. Tobacco use had steadily fallen for two decades before teen vaping reversed the trend in 2018.

The Trump administration's NIH budget proposal last year would have slashed $897 million from the National Cancer Institute, which has a hand in early development of many therapies. Trump ultimately signed a budget passed by Congress that gave NIH a $2.6 billion increase.

"Cancer rates dropped before you took office," tweeted Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), a breast cancer survivor. "Hopefully they keep dropping because Congress rejected your cruel research budgets."

Trump said in his State of the Union address last year that he would direct more money to therapies for childhood cancer.