HHS Proposed Budget Cuts NIH Funds Nearly 40%

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) proposed budget includes cuts to the funding for National Institutes of Health (NIH) of nearly 40%, CNN reported.

The proposed cuts to federal health agencies were first revealed in April. A newly released Budget in Brief document for fiscal year 2026 lays out HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s plan to prioritize his Make America Healthy Again initiative with a US$94.7 billion discretionary budget. He will also consolidate the work of HHS’s 27 institutions into eight.

The budget’s details for its agencies include:

• NIH funding in 2026 would be $27.5 billion, slashed from nearly $48.5 billion this year. The proposed NIH budget assumes a 15% cap on indirect costs that research institutions can charge the government, a highly controversial change that has been blocked in the courts, CNN reported.
• The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s budget would be approximately halved from more than $9 billion to slightly over $4 billion.
• Funding for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would be reduced from about $7 billion to slightly over $6.5 billion.

In the reorganized HHS, only three areas of the NIH— the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the National Institute on Aging— are slated to remain. Institutes researching childhood illnesses, mental health, chronic disease, disabilities and substance abuse would be shuffled into five new entities: the National Institute on Body Systems, National Institute on Neuroscience and Brain Research, National Institute of General Medical Sciences, the National Institute of Disability Related Research and National Institute of Behavioral Health.

The Administration for Healthy America, a new Kennedy agency, will consolidate divisions such as the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, the Health Resources and Services Administration, and several parts of the CDC. The new agency is budgeted for $14 billion in the 2026 budget.