The Trump administration is hoping to take a sledgehammer to science and public health. In its new proposed budget released this week, the White House is pushing for sweeping cuts to the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other vital agencies.
The White House revealed its budget proposal Friday. Some of the proposal’s lowlights include slashing the NIH and CDC’s budget by nearly 50%. While Congress is unlikely to pass all the cuts, passing just a few could destabilize the country’s public health programs and gravely set back scientific research.
Trump’s proposed budget calls for a total of $163 billion to be cut in non-defense discretionary spending for the 2026 fiscal year, or about 22% from this year’s current budget. It specifically asks for $18 billion to be cut from the NIH (around 40% of its current $47 billion budget), $4 billion from the CDC (roughly 50%), and $4 billion from the National Science Foundation (55%). It’s also pushing for entire divisions within these agencies to be eliminated as a part of a supposed reorganization, including those related to mental health and gun violence prevention. At the same time, the administration is pushing to increase military spending by 13%, to $1.01 trillion.
These proposals are also known as “skinny” budgets, since they don’t cover any single expenditure of the federal government. They’re often seen as symbolic, since it’s ultimately Congress that’s responsible for passing the federal budget. But that might not hold true this time.
For one, Republicans are in control of both houses of Congress. And secondly, the Trump White House has already tried (pending legal challenges) to slash some of the science and public health funding earmarked by previous budgets, suggesting that it won’t be stymied so easily.
The loss in knowledge, resources, and even potentially human lives that these cuts could create can’t be overstated.
The NIH has long punched above its weight in driving major medical breakthroughs and treatments. A 2018 study found, for instance, that NIH-funded research had contributed to the development of every single new drug approved in the U.S. between 2010 and 2016. Another study in 2023 found that the NIH had invested just as much per drug as the pharmaceutical industry on treatments approved between 2010 and 2019. These NIH-funded studies are predominantly basic research, meaning the sorts of early studies used to find or vet potential new drugs in the first place. One of many success stories that the NIH helped make possible? The development of GLP-1 drugs that eventually led to Ozempic.
The CDC, meanwhile, is the backbone of the country’s public health system, helping support state and local health departments across the country. These departments rely on the CDC for comprehensive lab testing and other resources not available to them. Among many other functions, the CDC helps keep our cruise ships free of norovirus and other stomach bugs—or at least they did until Trump gutted the CDC’s entire full-time staff dedicated to that program. The proposed budget cuts could also unravel the progress we’ve made against deadly public health crises like drug overdoses, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis.
Don’t worry, though—the Trump budget does propose $500 million for Make America Healthy Again (MAHA), the signature initiative of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He’s pledged to tackle the root causes of chronic disease through the project. But in his short tenure so far, he’s overseen massive funding and job cuts throughout the Department of Health and Human Services, and some of the cuts proposed by the Trump budget would directly target programs related to heart disease and other chronic ailments. RFK Jr. has also regularly spouted misinformation about vaccine safety and autism. He’s also a big believer of chemtrails—arguably one of the dumbest conspiracy theories out there—and recently said he’d appoint someone to investigate the sinister force he believes is behind them.
The Trump administration’s current and proposed budget cuts threaten everything from the quality of our milk to the vaccines that prevent once-eradicated diseases like measles from returning. And the effects of this drain will be felt both now and long into the future.
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