White House budget director Russ Vought isn’t done trying to cut the National Institutes of Health’s funding, but Congress isn’t taking him seriously anymore.
Vought released a proposal last week to slash the 2027 budget for the world’s largest funder of health research by 10 percent, down from 40 percent last year. It’s unlikely Congress or the agency’s head will listen to him.
Lawmakers rejected Vought’s first big cut in the spending bill they passed in February and already promised to reject the smaller one this year. While Vought has succeeded in trimming spending at some other agencies, the NIH has proven a hard target because lawmakers have a symbiotic relationship with the agency. Most of the money they dole out is returned to their states for disease research, clinical trials and other medical advances — plus photo-ops with researchers boasting about their breakthroughs are a win with voters.
The health research agency’s director, Jay Bhattacharya, is expected to defend the budget to Congress, but it’s unclear whether he stands behind cuts to his agency any more than Congress does. While other agencies, like the State Department, defied Congress and implemented Vought’s cost-cutting vision by not spending their budgets last year, Bhattacharya spent every dollar Congress gave him.
Lambert here: Bhattacharya is a weasel, but good for him.
Vought’s plan for the NIH last year, combined with cuts directed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, sent lawmakers of both parties into a panic. Besides the Democrats’ hand-wringing, Senate Appropriations Chair Susan Collins of Maine and another Republican on her panel, Katie Britt of Alabama, spoke out publicly about the threat posed to universities in their states. In the end, Congress gave the agency a $415 million raise. After a DOGE-directed slowdown in grant-making, Bhattacharya made a show of spending the agency’s budget by the end of the fiscal year on Sept. 30.
Bhattacharya reassured representatives that the days of slow-walked grants were over. “You all are very generous, actually, with the NIH last year, and my job is to make sure every single dollar goes out, and it will go out by the end of the year on excellent science,” he said.
Vought’s budget is still living in the pandemic era, with the budget proposal arguing that cutting the NIH is justified because it “broke the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.”
Lambert here: “[D]angerous ideologies’?
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