Congress has thwarted devastating budget cuts to key US government research funding agencies, such as the National Science Foundation (NSF), that were proposed by the Trump administration. There has been much relief within the nation’s research community.
The Association of American Universities, which represents leading US research universities, thanked Congress for ‘rejecting the administration-proposed massive cuts to key scientific research agencies’. ‘We are grateful to congressional appropriators for including small increases to the budgets of the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy Office of Science and for staving off large proposed cuts to funding for the National Science Foundation, Nasa Science, and basic research at the Department of Defense,’ the organisation said in a statement.
During the first Trump administration, Congress repeatedly stepped in to prevent significant cuts to key research agencies like the NSF. But many familiar with the federal research funding landscape were concerned that intervention from Capitol Hill was less likely this time around. That has turned out not to be the case.
Two appropriations bills for financial year 2026, passed by Congress and signed into law by President Trump on 23 January as part of a ‘minibus’ spending package, represented good news for US science agencies and the researchers across the country whose work they fund.
The NSF has received an $8.75 billion (£6.38 billion) budget for the rest of financial year 2026, which ends on 30 September. Although this represents an overall decrease of about 3.4% from last year, it is significantly less bleak than the 57% cut that the White House had requested.
NSF, like most US federal agencies, had been operating under a continuing resolution that maintained its funding at the previous year’s level since a 43-day US government shutdown ended in November 2025. A 30 January deadline for sorting out the 2026 budgets was looming to avoid another government shutdown.
The new minibus also gives the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which is the US’s largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences and oversees most of the national laboratories, a budget bump of roughly 2% to $8.4 billion. The figure is rosy compared with the 14% reduction proposed by the Trump administration.
Meanwhile, the appropriations bill that funds the National Institutes of Health (NIH) – the world’s largest biomedical funder – had yet to be signed into law on 3 February. The agency temporarily shut down at midnight on 31 January, as part of a partial government closure, when the continuing resolution through which it was being funded expired.
The NIH was set to see its budget slashed by about 40% under the White House request, but based on figures coming out of Congress the agency is now looking at a proposed 0.9% increase to $48.7 billion, according to analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Although the timing and likelihood of that bill’s passage is currently difficult to predict.
The latest estimates from the AAAS indicate that federal funding for basic research is slated to increase by 4% overall from last year’s levels, whereas President Trump’s budget request would have cut that funding by more than 30%.
‘While you’d ideally want to see increases in R&D budgets for scientific agencies year-over-year, Congress has moved in a promising bipartisan direction for fiscal year 2026,’ states Alessandra Zimmermann, who heads the R&D budget and policy programme for AAAS. ‘While we’re still waiting to see final numbers signed into law, the flat funding and cuts for some agencies that are on the table are a significant departure from the drastic cuts proposed by the administration last spring.’
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