House Republicans add to support for maintaining NIH budget in 2026
Read the full article in Science
Like a Senate panel in July, a U.S. House of Representatives spending committee has rejected President Donald Trump’s request to gut the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). A bill released today would give the agency a base budget of about $47 billion in the 2026 fiscal year that begins on 1 October, essentially the same level as this year.
However, the bill proposes a 37% cut to the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H), an independent agency within NIH to fund financially risky, cutting-edge research. The bill would also slash the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by 19%. And it would ban funding for certain pathogen experiments and fetal tissue research.
Trump had proposed cutting NIH by 40%, eliminating three of its 27 institutes and centers, and consolidating the rest into eight institutes including some new ones. Instead, the bill to be marked up later today by the Republican-led House Committee on Appropriations subcommittee that oversees spending for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) maintains NIH’s current configuration and gives institute budgets a slight overall raise of $99 million to $46.9 billion.
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In targeting CDC for a budget cut, the panel’s Republican leaders write in a summary that they want to focus the agency’s work “on communicable diseases rather than social engineering”—an apparent reference to efforts to encourage healthy behaviors. The bill would cut funding the agency’s $9.2 billion budget by 19% and streamline 35 “duplicative and controversial programs.” However, funding for infectious diseases would rise by 2%, or $55 million. The Senate version of the bill trimmed the agency’s overall budget by just 0.8%, or $70 million.
Research!America warned that “these proposed cuts [at CDC], coupled with recent turmoil at the agency’s leadership, endanger our nation’s health.” (Trump fired CDC Director Susan Monarez last week after she clashed with HHS Director Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine policies.)
After the subcommittee votes on the bill later today, it goes to the full House Appropriations Committee, and will then need to be passed by the full House. House lawmakers would next need to negotiate final numbers with the Senate, which has supported giving NIH a $400 million raise and does not restrict specific research areas.
But it’s increasingly likely that Congress will be unable to agree on final 2026 funding levels by the end of this fiscal year on 30 September. At that point, lawmakers could instead pass legislation that maintains agency funding at HHS and other parts of the federal government at this year’s levels, or the government could shut down until some agreement is reached.