The House is on track to join the Senate in rejecting the Trump administration’s budget proposal that would cut NIH by $18 billion.
A Senate hearing that the administration hoped would be a routine check-in on the president’s 2026 MAHA-driven healthcare agenda erupted into a political firestorm as senators jumped at their first opportunity to confront HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over the chaos engulfing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Bits of good news for NIH flickered consistently over the past week.
Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health to defend the HHS fiscal year 2026 budget proposal, and faced criticism from several Democratic lawmakers on what they described as a lack of transparency and scientific rigor in the agency’s recent decisions.
In a 96-minute hearing in front of the Senate Appropriations Committee on the Trump administration’s budget, senators slammed NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya for not taking responsibility for the funding cuts to research and upheaval at NIH.
In back-to-back congressional hearings earlier this week, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said that the massive staff and budget cuts over which he has presided during his nearly four months on the job as well as even bigger cuts still looming on the horizon are a part of a single plan.
In the starkest opposition yet by Republicans to the Trump administration’s attacks on HHS agencies, senators from both parties sounded an alarm about the damage being done to biomedical research in the U.S.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that it is making sweeping revisions by cutting personnel, centralizing functions, and consolidating divisions.
Amid the flood zone of today’s Washington, the confirmation hearing for Jayanta (Jay) Bhattacharya’s nomination as director of NIH was remarkably calm.
The House Republicans have narrowly pushed through a FY25 budget resolution, setting off a tangle of life-and-death sequelae for access to health insurance through Medicaid and Obamacare, and through a second-order effect, biomedical research.
