A scientist at the National Cancer Institute shows a patient the difference between CT scans showing cancerous tumors and a clean scan after treatment.SAUL LOEB/Getty
On Friday, the Trump administration released a detailed look at its proposed 2026 budget, including major cuts to federal science agencies that oversee research on everything from cancer to the cosmos.
While the broad strokes of Trump’s budget had been released in early May, the new proposal reveals more about what specific programs the president would like to see cut—and its impact on American science.
That includes a more than $30 billion cut to the Department of Health and Human Services, which houses the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)—agencies tasked with critical work like overseeing food safety, controlling disease outbreaks (see: measles), and supporting vaccine research. The Department of Education, as the New York Times tallied, would have its budget cut by about $12 billion—a blow to funding mechanisms like Pell grants that help promising future scientists afford college. And NASA’s budget, as Space.com reported, would shrink by $6 billion, a nearly 25 percent cut to the agency that oversees space exploration.
At NIH, which has already come under repeated scrutiny by the administration, the president proposed a budget cut of about $18 billion, the Times reports—around a 40 percent decrease of its current funds. Within NIH, the National Cancer Institute, responsible for supporting research on understanding and treating cancer, would see its funding cut from $7 billion to a little over $4.5 billion.
These cuts, experts say, will be detrimental to the national research landscape—and Americans’ health. As Harvard researchers noted in an op-ed published in JAMA Health Forum this week, more than 99 percent of new drugs approved between 2010 and 2019 had roots in NIH funding. Every dollar of NIH funding, in fact, returns more than 2.5 dollars in economic activity, a coalition of academic and industry scientists estimated in a widely cited report this year. In all, the Harvard researchers estimate, cutting $20 billion to NIH over 25 years may save $500 billion on paper, but it’d end up costing $8.2 trillion in lost human health.
And that’s just NIH. The National Science Foundation, along with NIH, is another major funder of American research. It would see more than half of its funding slashed under Trump’s budget, from nearly $9 billion in 2025 to $3.9 billion. This reduction, according to the administration, “reflects a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment.” As science journalist Dan Garisto pointed out on Bluesky, it would mean the number of staff, students, and researchers involved in NSF-supported science would drop from more than 330,000 to about 90,000—a whopping 73 percent cut.
And at NASA, Trump’s proposed budget would mean “the biggest single-year cut to NASA in history,” Space.com reports, and the cancellation of several programs, including a project to collect material from Mars and explore the depths of the solar system, projects that would reportedly take billions to replace. In a statement Friday, the Planetary Society, a non-profit organization advocating for space exploration and research, called the president’s proposed cuts, if passed by Congress, an “extinction-level event” for science. “It will damage the agency’s highly skilled workforce, abandon national priorities, and gut STEM education and outreach.”
