The US National Institutes of Health budget is planned to be cut by 40% in 2026

Thus, Democratic Senator Patty Murray reported that 160 clinical trials (CTs) supported by the NIH were terminated in 2025, and grant allocations for several projects were frozen or delayed. According to Murray, 23-year-old studies of an HIV vaccine were suspended at the end of May 2025 - a decision, as the senator noted, deprived 6 thousand patients of access to therapy. "How many CTs will lose funding next year with an $18 billion budget cut?" Murray lamented.

During the hearing, representatives of the American Alzheimer's Association also expressed their concerns. In their opinion, NIH budget cuts "will stop critical research."

Earlier this week, more than 300 NIH employees sent a letter to Bhattacharya condemning the agency’s massive layoffs and the cancellation of “thousands” of research projects on a growing list of areas the Trump administration has called “politicized,” including COVID-19, gender health, and vaccinations, according to the letter’s authors.

Questions about the number of NIH employees who left were also raised at a hearing in the upper house of the US parliament. In particular, senators asked Bhattacharya to name the total number of employees who left the NIH cancer center since Donald Trump took office as US president. The information that congressmen wanted to hear was supposed to include involuntary dismissals, early retirements, and deals in which employees were offered to leave the institution in exchange for one-time payments. Bhattacharya reported that 25 NIH employees were fired.

The NIH made the decision to cut grants for “politicized” research in collaboration with the Trump administration, Bhattacharya said, but the agency director took full responsibility for the decisions. The NIH chief also concluded that the institutes “need reform” and that the agency must abandon “business as usual” to restore its reputation.

At the moment, the new US budget plan is at the stage of approval by Congress. The Nature publication recalls that in 2017, during his first presidential term, Trump already proposed a significant reduction in thematic spending, but the parliament, on the contrary, agreed to a small increase in funding. However, as experts note, since then the composition of Congress has changed significantly - now it has more representatives loyal to the Trump administration.

NIH is the largest government fund for medical research in the world. In 2023, the organization allocated 59 thousand grants. In 2024, the NIH budget was estimated at $47.35 billion, in 2025, about $45 billion was allocated for funding, and for 2026, it is proposed to allocate only $27 billion. In April of this year, experts calculated that from February 28 to March 28, 2025, NIH terminated 780 grants. Some of them were canceled completely, for others, additional payments for related projects implemented as additional initiatives were canceled. Among other things, research on vaccination, HIV infection and others lost grants.

Donald Trump's appointment of health economist Jaya Bhattacharya as NIH Director was announced in late November 2024. Bhattacharya is remembered in the media as a critic of quarantine measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was one of the three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter prepared in October 2020. It criticized quarantine measures and called for the promotion of "herd immunity." The authors insisted that people who are not at risk should get sick and develop immunity naturally.

Another change in the head of the industry regulator, which occurred at the decision of Donald Trump, occurred at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). In February 2025, this position was taken by Robert Kennedy Jr. In June, he announced the dismissal of 17 members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), which operates under the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The department explained the decision by the intention to carry out a "complete reconstruction" of ACIP. Kennedy Jr. emphasized that the initiative is aimed at "restoring public trust" and not at forming "any specific pro- or anti-vaccination agenda." At the same time, the new minister has previously repeatedly expressed skepticism about vaccination.

Robert Desnick, a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics, professor and founder of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, spoke to Vademecum the day before about the significant contribution of the NIH to the discovery of revolutionary treatment methods, including genetic diseases.