HHS budget proposal details significant cuts to National Institutes of Health, other agencies

By Katherine Dillinger, CNN

(CNN) — A budget proposal for the US Department of Health and Human Services details extensive cuts to funding for the National Institutes of Health, part of an effort to consolidate the work of its 27 institutes into just eight while reducing the agency’s budget nearly 40%.

The proposed cuts to federal health agencies were first revealed in a preliminary memo from White House budget officials 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 $94.7 billion discretionary budget.

The budget for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would be slashed from more than $9 billion to just over $4 billion and funding for the US Food and Drug Administration cut from about $7 billion to just over $6.5 billion.

However, some of the biggest changes will be felt at the NIH, where the budget document lists 2026 funding at $27.5 billion, down from nearly $48.5 billion in 2025.

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 set to be preserved. 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.

But even the surviving institutes won’t be spared cuts: The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases had a budget of more than $6.5 billion in 2025 but will receive just over $4 billion in 2026. The National Cancer Institute, which received more than $7 billion for 2025, will get about $4.5 billion next year. And the National Institute on Aging will see its budget cut from $4.4 billion to less than $2.7 billion in 2026.

The proposed NIH budget assumes a 15% cap on indirect costs that research institutions can charge the government, itself a highly controversial change that has been blocked in the courts.

The new document also details plans for the Administration for Healthy America, a new agency created under Kennedy that 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 AHA is set to receive $14 billion in the 2026 budget.

The 2026 HHS budget “reflects the President’s vision of making Americans the healthiest in the world while achieving his goal of transforming the bureaucracy,” the document says. At the NIH, restructuring “will create efficiencies … that will allow the agency to focus on true science, and coordinate research to make the best use of federal funds.”

But expert groups were more critical of the proposal.

The NIH cuts “would have far-reaching and irreversible consequences not only to the entire biomedical research enterprise, but also to the millions of Americans who rely on advances in biomedical research to safeguard and improve their health and their very lives,” Dr. Stephen Jameson, president of the American Association of Immunologists, said in a statement Friday.

The agency supported hundreds of thousands of jobs in 2024 and contributed nearly $100 billion in economic activity across the US, Jameson said. “Undermining NIH support threatens both local economies and our national competitiveness on the global scale.”

Research!America, a nonprofit that advocates for science and innovation, said it was “alarmed” by the budget proposal.

“If the proposal is enacted, Americans today and tomorrow will be sicker, poorer, and die younger,” President and CEO Mary Woolley said in a statement. “American research has a proven track record of increasing survival, reducing the burden of illness, and creating jobs. Cutting research funding helps no one; instead, it hurts everyone.”

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