Science Policy This Week: January 12, 2026

What’s Ahead

Building 1 at the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, covered in snow. — The NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland.

NIH

Compromise NIH and DOD funding bills released

Congressional appropriators released their four remaining spending bills for fiscal year 2026 this week. The Labor and Health and Human Services bill rejects the White House’s proposed 40% cut to the National Institutes of Health, instead proposing roughly level funding of $48.7 billion. The Defense bill proposes $149 billion (a 4% increase) for the Department of Defense’s Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation programs, which the Trump administration had proposed cutting by about 1%. The package also includes the Homeland Security bill and the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies bill.

The spending package adds to previous efforts by Congress to prevent the Trump administration from unilaterally capping indirect cost reimbursement rates. Courts have already blocked many of these caps, including at NIH and the DOD. The Defense bill would block DOD from modifying its indirect cost rate, and the Labor and HHS bill includes similar language that applies to NIH and expresses support for the Financial Accountability in Research (FAIR) model being promoted by higher-ed groups.

The Senate is currently in recess until next week. Funding for numerous federal agencies will expire at the end of January unless new spending legislation becomes law before then. The first batch of spending bills released this month covers a large portion of federal science funders, including NASA, NOAA, NIST, USGS, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science. That batch has passed through both chambers and now awaits the president’s signature, which the White House has indicated he will provide. A second batch, which includes the Financial Services and General Government bill and the National Security, Department of State, and Related Programs bill, passed the House last week and is awaiting action in the Senate.

DOD issues AI strategy

The Department of Defense is pursuing a new AI strategy that emphasizes deployment speed and expanding access to computational power. “We will win this race by becoming an AI-first warfighting force across all domains,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in his announcement of the strategy last week at a SpaceX facility in Texas. A memo outlining the strategy states that DOD will support and leverage the American Science and Security Platform being developed as part of the Department of Energy-led Genesis Mission, and that DOD will “invest substantial resources” in building computational resources, including data centers. The memo directs DOD’s Chief Digital and AI Office to enable the latest models from AI companies to be deployed at DOD within 30 days of public release and states, “We must accept that the risks of not moving fast enough outweigh the risks of imperfect alignment.” It also directs CDAO to establish criteria for “robust experimentation” with AI capabilities and to establish benchmarks for “model objectivity” that can be used during procurement. “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and social ideology have no place in the DoW, so we must not employ AI models which incorporate ideological ‘tuning’ that interferes with their ability to provide objectively truthful responses to user prompts,” the memo states.

Another memo empowers the under secretary of defense for research and engineering, Emil Michael, to set technical direction for the entire department. “An empowered CTO will inject a disruptive mindset directly into our systems, directing the power of America’s world leading scientists and entrepreneurs, our cutting-edge labs, the tech ecosystem and our capital markets to build what the warfighter needs, but to do so better, faster and cheaper,” Hegseth said at the SpaceX event. The memo replaces existing innovation groups within DOD with a single “action group” under the under secretary.

Science nominations back under Senate consideration

The White House has resubmitted nominees for key science positions after the nominations expired at the end of last year. The nominees include Arvind Raman to be director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Raman is currently dean of engineering at Purdue University, where he has worked as a professor of mechanical engineering since 2000. President Donald Trump has also re-nominated Matthew Anderson to be deputy administrator of NASA, Wesley Brooks to be assistant secretary of state for oceans and international environmental and scientific affairs, and Steven Haines to be assistant secretary of commerce for industry and analysis. Under Senate rules from last year, the Senate may consider and approve nominations in blocs rather than moving them one at a time. Several major science positions are still awaiting nominations, including the heads of the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science.

Also on our radar

DOE has removed the “as low as reasonably achievable” (ALARA) standard for radiation safety from its regulations and will decide on replacement standards, E&E News reported.
Harvard now ranks third, behind two Chinese universities, in a newly updated global ranking based on scientific research output from 2020 to 2023. However, Harvard still ranks highest when comparing the number of highly cited publications. Within physical sciences and engineering, MIT is the highest-ranked U.S. university at 53rd.
DOE and NASA announced an agreement to support R&D for a nuclear reactor on the Moon that will enable future sustained lunar missions.
The White House indefinitely halted processing of immigrant visas for 75 countries, including Russia and several Middle Eastern and North African countries. The changes do not impact nonimmigrant visas for tourists, students, or temporary workers.
Republican senators led by Tom Cotton (AK) have asked DOE to ban Chinese nationals from working at or accessing national labs in order to protect the Genesis Mission.