NEW YORK – In a letter sent Friday to the Senate Committee on Appropriations, the Trump administration called for a nearly $18 billion cut to funding for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in fiscal year 2026, which would represent a roughly 37 percent drop from 2025 funding levels.
In its comments accompanying the suggested cuts, the administration wrote, "NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health."
The letter also calls for consolidation of "multiple overlapping and ill-focused programs into five new focus areas" — the National Institute on Body Systems Research; the National Institute on Neuroscience and Brain Research; the National Institute of General Medical Sciences; the National Institute of Disability Related Research; and the National Institute on Behavioral Health.
Additionally, the Trump budget proposed in the letter would eliminate funding for the National Institute on Minority and Health Disparities ($534 million), the Fogarty International Center ($95 million), which focuses on global health research, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health ($170 million), and the National Institute of Nursing Research ($198 million). It would retain the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.
The letter also calls for a $3.6 billion cut to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a roughly 39 percent decrease from its current annual funding level of $9.3 billion, as well as a $674 million cut to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
A draft of the Trump administration's fiscal year 2026 budget proposal leaked in April requested roughly $27 billion in funds for NIH in 2026, which would have represented a 44 percent cut from 2025, deeper than the 37 percent cut proposed in this week's letter.
The leaked draft also detailed the administration's plan to consolidate multiple agencies within the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), including the elimination of four NIH institutes or centers and the combination of the remaining 23 into a total of eight.