House GOP keeps NIH funding Trump wanted to cut
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House Republicans are rejecting President Trump's nearly $20 billion proposed budget cut for the National Institutes of Health in an increasingly rare show of bipartisan support for biomedical research.
Why it matters: The NIH has faced turmoil over canceled grants, staff cuts and other policy changes, but the proposal to keep funding relatively flat shows there are limits to how much House Republicans will accommodate the administration's designs for the agency.
Driving the news: House Republicans this week released a fiscal 2026 spending bill covering the Health and Human Services Department that keeps NIH funding relatively flat at about $48 billion, a far cry from the roughly 40% cut the administration proposed over the summer.
- House Appropriations Committee Republicans wrote in a summary of the bill that the funds are "maintaining America's edge in basic biomedical research for cures to cancer, Alzheimer's disease, and rare diseases."
- A bipartisan Senate spending bill for HHS also rejected the administration's proposed cuts and included a small increase for the NIH.
Yes, but: The House GOP measure does include significant cuts in other areas, including funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and HIV/AIDS prevention programs. HHS overall would see a $7 billion, or 6%, cut next year from this year's levels.
- The NIH is not entirely out of the woods yet. The Trump administration has already taken unilateral action without Congress to withhold grants, and there is a question of whether the agency's political leaders will actually spend all of the money lawmakers provide.
- A congressional watchdog found last month that the Trump administration had illegally withheld some NIH funds.
The big picture: The House GOP spending bill won't become law and is almost certain to be swept up in this month's showdown over keeping the government open. But it's still a marker of the chamber's priorities in upcoming negotiations.
- Spending bills need to get 60 votes in the Senate for passage, meaning some Democrats must sign on. Democrats panned the House GOP bill for what they termed damaging cuts to health programs.
- But the likelihood is Congress will rely on a short-term stopgap spending measure to keep the government funded past a Sept. 30 deadline, if there isn't a shutdown. That would largely maintain the status quo for the NIH and other health agencies.
The bottom line: The NIH's once-strong bipartisan support has frayed due to fallout from the pandemic response and Trump administration concerns with DEI programs and other targets.
- Republicans last year proposed streamlining the agency, reducing the number of institutes by almost half and removing its authority over "gain-of-function" research.
- But Congress now is serving notice that on overall NIH funding levels, it does not want deep cuts.
