The Senate Appropriations Committee has voted for a $400 million increase in the NIH budget. Pictured here are committee Vice Chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., Chair Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. on Thursday, July 31, 2025. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
You know that whole checks and balances thing laid out by the U.S. Constitution? It’s where Congress is not supposed to automatically agree with what the Executive Branch wants to do. Well, on Thursday, the Senate Appropriations Committee essentially checked what U.S. President Donald Trump has been trying to do to the National Institutes of Health and showed that it doesn’t quite agree. In its budget for the U.S. government’s 2026 fiscal year, the Trump Administration had proposed a rather massive $18 billion cut, which would amount to a 40% chop in funding for the NIH. But the Senate Committee ended up voting for kind of the opposite: a bill and budget that would give the NIH a $400 million budget increase.
The Senate Budget Would Include Modest Increases For The NIH
This budget increase would include a $30 million bump in funding to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a $50 million bump to the National Cancer Institute, bringing their total respective funding to $6.59 billion, and $7.37 billion. There’s also an $12 million increase in funding for the BRAIN Initiative, which ifunds different researchers across the country to study and better understand, you guessed, the brain. That’s after this heady initiative had suffered cuts for the past two years. All in all the NIH’s total budget would be $48.7 billion should this initial Senate bill and its budget ultimately hold.
The Senate Budget Includes All 27 NIH Institutes And Centers
Not only that. The preliminary budget that emerged from the Senate committee kept all current 27 NIH institutes and centers essentially intact. That’s notable because it goes against the Trump Administration’s plan to go bye-bye-bye to many of these centers and institutes and effectively shrink the NIH. For example, soon after he took office, Trump issued an Executive Order that has led to the termination of numerous federal grants that mention diversity, equity or inclusion in some way. Many of these grants were originally issued by the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities. But the Senate Committee kept the NIMHD budget for FY 2026 essentially the same as it was this past year.
The Senate Budget Does Not Include The AHA Plan From RFK, Jr.
And there weren’t any AHA moments in the Senate budget, so to speak. AHA is the acronym for the Administration for a Healthy America, the name of the agency that U.S. Department of Health and Human Secretary Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been wanting to create. Kennedy has sought to eliminate many existing health programs across different government agencies and then roll them into the new AHA. But the Senate bill made no mention of this plan and basically ignored it. I am reaching out to contacts at HHS and NIH for their reactions.
The Senate Budget Maintain NIH Funding Rates For Indirect Costs
Finally, the Senate committee essentially said, “Oh, no you don’t” to the Trump Administration’s plans to cap funding for indirect cost payments at a 15% rate. Such a rate would be well below what they’ve been for most universities, academic medical centers and other research organizations, as I’ve detailed previously in Forbes. That’s prompted lawsuits against the Trump Administration that led to a federal judge blocking the proposed indirect cost funding change and the Trump Administration appealing the ruling.
The Senate Committee Vote For The NIH Bill Was A Bipartisan 26-3
And the vote wasn’t a party all the time situation either. The committee voted 26-3 for all of the above, which meant that the vote wasn’t simply split across party lines as so many Congressional votes seem to go these days. No, this looked like bipartisan opposition to what the Trump Administration wants to do to the NIH. Prominent Republican supporters of the bill included Senators Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina).
Could this be a “Back to the Future” situation where the NIH has support from both major political parties? Perhaps. Historically, at least until recent years, the NIH has enjoyed bipartisan support, probably because most people are in favor of the whole find-and-fund-new-ways-to-prevent-and-treat-disease thing that the NIH has been doing.
Of course, the budget wrangling is far from done. The Senate still has to go through the rest of the appropriations process, which undoubtedly will include more wheeling and dealing and maybe at least a few social media posts from who knows who. Then there’s the other side of Congress, the House of Representatives, that has to go through the whole appropriations thing as well.
Plus, the White House and its Office of Management and Budget have continued to take steps that appear to bypass Congress’s authority to oversee the budget for the NIH. For example, last week, the NIH had implemented what would be a major shift in how it issues grant funding to external researchers. The longstanding policy was that if you were awarded say a five-year grant, the funding for each year would come from that year’s NIH budget. Going forward, the NIH wants to change it so that the entire five years of funding would be issued from the NIH budget year corresponding to the first year of the grant. This would severely limit and drop the number of awards that the NIH could issue in a given year.
And earlier this week, the OMB tried to put a pause on the NIH issuing any new grants, as I described in Forbes. But when blowback ensued, the White House put a pause on this pause, reversed course and allowed the NIH to issue funding to external researchers again. The concern is that such shifts in policies and pauses as well as grant terminations may be ways to slash the NIH budget without the approval of Congress.
Nevertheless, after several months of the Trump Administration cutting and terminating NIH grants, contracts, personnel and influence seemingly with impunity, this marks the first big, concrete pushback from Congress. It is a reminder that it’s Congress and not the White House or the rest Executive Branch that ultimately decides who gets what money. Congress was bestowed that power by that thing called the U.S. Constitution. This separation of powers was done to prevent any single branch or person from becoming too powerful and basically take over the country.
