House Joins Senate in Rejecting Drastic NIH Cuts Pushed by Trump

Congress is on track to reject the Trump administration’s proposal to gut funding for the National Institutes of Health.

The House Appropriations Committee’s Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies Subcommittee unveiled its fiscal year 2026 budget plans this week. Committee members voted 11-7 to advance the bill during a markup session on Tuesday, with Democrats opposing.

While the committee has yet to publish a full breakdown of its spending proposal, a Democrat press release says the bill will include a $47.8 billion budget for NIH — a reduction of $456 million, but far short of the $19.4 billion cut proposed in President Donald Trump’s budget request. The House proposal also appears to reject White House plans to restructure NIH’s 27 institutes and centers.

The Senate has proposed increasing NIH’s budget to $48.7 billion for fiscal year 2026. Senators also rejected plans to reorganize NIH and included a reminder in their appropriations bill that 24 of the NIH’s institutes and centers were established in statute, and that plans to restructure them should be communicated to the Senate and the House with ample notice.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Tom Cole (R-OK) said in an online statement that the budget proposal directs taxpayer dollars “where they matter most” and “prioritizes cutting-edge biomedical research.” At the markup hearing on Tuesday, Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) disagreed — urging her colleagues to block the bill.

“The bill cuts NIH research funding by $500 million,” DeLauro said. “This comes as Russ Vought [director of the Office of Management and Budget] has canceled previously awarded grants, throwing away potential life-saving cures or treatments and wasting millions of dollars in the process.”

DeLauro added that the proposed NIH cuts are “sad” because for “eight straight years” she worked with Cole to provide annual increases for NIH research. “Biomedical research used to be a bipartisan priority in the Congress,” DeLauro said. “Sadly, those days are gone.”

While the House’s proposed NIH budget does include a boost for some NIH institutes — such as an additional $48 million for the National Cancer Institute, bringing its budget to nearly $7.3 billion — it also includes a significant cut to the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Health. Under the House’s proposal, ARPA-H’s budget would fall by $555 million to $945 million.

DeLauro and other Democrats on the committee also voiced concerns about proposed cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The House bill proposes a $1.7 billion cut to the CDC, bringing its budget down to $7.4 billion. The Senate has proposed a cut of $70 million — a 0.8% reduction that contrasts sharply with the 19% cut proposed by the House.

The proposed CDC budget cuts come as the agency faces a leadership crisis following the ouster of former CDC Director Susan Monarez and pressure from Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to change vaccine policies. Kennedy defended his actions in a Senate Finance Committee hearing on the administration’s health care agenda this week.

Speaking at the subcommittee markup on Tuesday, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) said there is a “clear crisis of confidence in this administration’s management of the CDC.”

“This bill signals to the men and women charged with keeping our country safe from disease that they are not valued, that this administration does not believe in their mission, that science must take a back seat to the ego and the arrogance of the health secretary and the president,” said Watson Coleman. “That’s not going to make America healthy; it’s going to make and keep us sick,” she added.

Congress has less than a month to decide how to fund the federal government for fiscal year 2026, which begins Oct. 1, or face a partial government shutdown.