Congress rejects Trump administration’s deepest proposed science cuts
Congress rejected the administration’s deepest proposed science cuts, increasing NIH funding by about $415 million to $48.7 billion. NASA and NSF also saw far smaller reductions than proposed.
Congress, under Republican control in both chambers, has systematically rejected the administration’s most extreme proposals on science funding. In the funding bill that President Trump signed into law this month, lawmakers not only declined to cut NIH’s budget by about 40 percent; they instead increased it by roughly $415 million, bringing the final number to $48.7 billion, virtually unchanged from the prior year.
Lawmakers added targeted funding for cancer research, Alzheimer’s disease, and the BRAIN Initiative for the development of neurotechnologies. Congress also included detailed language constraining executive overreach. It reiterated that NIH cannot unilaterally change how indirect-cost rates work, limited the agency’s ability to shift funds toward multiyear awards that crowd out new grants, required monthly briefings to Congress on grant awards and terminations to ensure the allocated money is actually being distributed, and directed NIH to continue to professionalize the hiring of institute directors, with external scientific input and congressional oversight.
Similar patterns hold elsewhere. NASA faces a 1.6 percent cut rather than the 24 percent the administration sought. The NSF budget dropped 3.4 percent instead of 57 percent.
The Trump administration proposed slashing NIH by about 40 percent. It attempted to cap indirect-cost recovery, the portion of federal grants that reimburses universities for expenses such as facilities, compliance, security, and equipment, at 15 percent, threatening billions in research infrastructure. It stalled grants, cleared out agency leadership, imposed political approval requirements on funding decisions, such as requiring senior political appointees to sign off on grants before they could be awarded and terminating programs addressing racial health gaps, and implemented targeted funding freezes at particular universities.
Research published last fall in Science analyzed a comprehensive database of federal science appropriations from 1980 to 2020, including 171 budget accounts across 27 agencies such as NIH, NASA, NSF, CDC, and Pentagon R&D programs. When Republicans controlled the House or the presidency, science funding was substantially higher, on average about $150 million more per budget account under a Republican House than a Democratic one, and $100 million more under a Republican president than a Democratic one. The analysis found significantly higher appropriations for NIH under Republican control, higher funding for CDC under Republican presidents, and marginally higher support for NASA and NSF.
The budget accounts in that database track recurring operating expenses allocated across all parts of the federal government for science and research, including science done through grant-making and contracting with corporations. They do not follow outgoing grants to researchers directly, so the numbers do not capture the kinds of funding freezes the administration imposed on universities including Harvard, Columbia, and Penn.