The proposal released late Friday provides new details that were missing from the administration’s initial release about a month ago.
The latest proposal reflects HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s focus on chronic disease and desire to reshape the federal health agencies. The White House said the plan “prioritizes resources to efficiently achieve our goal to Make America Healthy Again (MAHA).”
While presidential budget requests aren’t signed into law, they can serve as a blueprint for lawmakers as they begin crafting their funding legislation.
Stakeholder groups and outside experts said the proposal shows a concerted effort to shift funding away from public health priorities and biomedical research.
For instance, the plan calls for slashing the budget of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) by nearly 40 percent from FY 2025.
“You might as well gift wrap the future and hand it to China,” Sen. Patty Murray (Wash.), the Senate Appropriations Committee’s top Democrat, said in a statement.
It would consolidate the agency’s 27 institutes, leaving just three intact: the National Cancer Institute, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and the National Institute of Aging, with significant funding cuts. The others would be consolidated into five new institutes and centers.
“This restructuring will create efficiencies within NIH that will allow the agency to focus on true science, and coordinate research to make the best use of federal funds,” according to the HHS Budget in Brief.
But the organizations impacted don’t see it that way.
“Returning to funding levels from two decades ago – and three decades ago when accounting for biomedical inflation – will set this nation back dramatically in our ability to reduce death and suffering from a disease that is expected to kill more than 618,000 Americans this year alone,” the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network (ACS CAN) said in a statement.
“If the proposal is enacted, Americans today and tomorrow will be sicker, poorer, and die younger,” Mary Woolley, CEO of Research!America, a science advocacy nonprofit, said in a statement.
Russell Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, said the administration wants a strong NIH and will continue to prioritize cancer research.
But in a CNN interview Sunday, Vought said the agency has gotten too big and too political.
“It’s more about the NIH, and the NIH has been a bureaucracy that we believe has been weaponized against the American people,” he told CNN.
