Inside (the Beltway) Scoop

By: Ellen Kuo
Thursday, June 12, 2025
Detailed President’s Budget for Fiscal Year 2026 Released

On May 30, various agencies began releasing more details and an appendix around their proposed fiscal year (FY) 2026 budget after the initial skinny budget of May 2. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), where the National Institutes of Health (NIH) falls, has details on its program level of $27.9 billion. This drops NIH down approximately 40 percent from the program level of $46 billion as mentioned in the appendix. Under the proposed budget, the Advanced Research Project Agency for Health would receive $945 billion and  move from NIH to the newly formed Assistant Secretary for a Healthy Future in alignment with the HHS reorganization and continues under the Full-Year Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2025 (Division A of Public Law 119-4).

Additionally, the various institutes and centers have been collapsed down to specific funding lines for the National Cancer Institute, National Institute on Body Systems, National Institute on Neuroscience and Brain Research, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, National Institute for Child and Women’s Health, Sensory Disorders, and Communications, National Institute on Aging, and National Institute of Behavioral Health. A chart showing the consolidation can be found here on Page 22. According to the May 2 description of changes addressed to Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins, the FY 2026 Discretionary Budget request “eliminates funding for the NIH National Institute on Minority and Health Disparities (-$534 million), which is replete with DEI expenditures, the Fogarty International Center (-$95 million), the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (-$170 million), and the National Institute of Nursing Research (-$198 million). NIH research would align with the President’s priorities to address chronic disease and other epidemics, implementing all executive orders, and eliminating research on climate change, radical gender ideology, and divisive racialism. This new structure retains the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health.” 

The National Science Foundation (NSF) saw a severe cut as expected to $3.9 billion from the $8.8 billion of discretionary funding in NSF FY 2026 budget request to Congress, which is a 56 percent drop. Additionally, the Research & Related Activities (R&RA) line fell from $8.35 billion to $3.28 billion. R&RA is where investments are made in early-stage research, as well as the development of a future-focused science and engineering workforce that can accelerate progress in basic science and engineering research, and support the private sector. NSF is the only federal agency dedicated to funding basic research across all areas of non-biomedical science and engineering.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Science budget dropped by $1.2 billion to $7.092 billion, or approximately 15 percent, from its FY 2025 level. The Department of Veterans Affairs VA medical and prosthetic research program FY 2026 request remains unchanged from the FY 2025 enacted level of $943 million. The Department of Agriculture’s Agriculture and Food Research Initiative request is $405 million, which is a $40.2 million or a 10 percent drop from its FY 2025 enacted level of $445.2 million.