Coalition Statement on the FY 2026 Proposed NIH Budget
Following is the Coalition’s statement on the Fiscal Year 2026 proposed budget for the National Institutes of Health, submitted today to the Senate Appropriations Committee.
Prepared for the Senate Committee on Appropriation
Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies
Regarding the Fiscal Year 2026 National Institutes of Health (NIH) Budget
June 13, 2025
Chair Capito, Ranking Member Baldwin and members of the subcommittee. Thank you for holding this hearing to scrutinize the proposed Fiscal Year 2026 budget for the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The Coalition for Pediatric Medical Research (the Coalition) consists of over 20 of the nation’s leading research-intensive children’s hospitals and pediatric academic departments that are deeply committed to child health research spanning basic discovery science through translational and clinical research. A robust NIH is essential to the work of our members and the larger academic pediatric medical research community to ensure and improve the health and well-being of our nation’s children.
Over the past two decades, the Coalition has advocated on behalf of many public policies to strengthen the NIH’s commitment to child health research. The Coalition’s work recognizes that a vibrant child health research agenda is necessary to identify ways to prevent, detect and cure conditions that impact children to improve the overall health and well-being of our nation’s children as well as adults. While children lie at the heart of pediatric research, many conditions that onset during adulthood – including chronic diseases such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease – have their roots during the earliest years of life, meaning that a robust research agenda focused on children has wide ranging applicability to improve health across the lifespan.
Given our focus on pediatric research and the NIH, we are extremely concerned about and opposed to much of what has been proposed for the NIH in the Fiscal Year 2026 budget. The proposal pairs a devastating reduction in the NIH’s budget with major changes to agency operations, including dilution of the longstanding structure to support children’s health through a consolidation of Institutes and Centers. If enacted as proposed, the proposal would have profound negative consequences on our healthcare research ecosystem and set back decades of progress. Specifically, we are strongly opposed to the following:
– A dramatic and irreplaceable reduction in total funding for the NIH that would reduce agency funding to a level last seen more than two decades ago.
– The continued push to reduce federal facilities and administrative (F&A) or indirect payments to a flat 15 percent.
– Elimination or consolidation of Institutes and Centers and consolidation of many others in a manner that fails to include an appropriate focus on child and lifespan research.
Overall Funding Level
For decades, funding biomedical research supported by the NIH has been a highly bipartisan national priority. It was then-President Bill Clinton and a Republican-controlled Congress that drove the five-year effort to double the NIH budget in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and they did so because of the tremendous importance of a robust medical research ecosystem to the future health, well-being and overall prosperity of our nation.
The proposed FY 26 budget would undo all of this progress and set American research enterprise back decades just as global competitors, namely China, are increasing their own commitments to this purpose. An NIH budget funded at the level proposed would place it in current dollars where we were more than 20 years ago. This amount would be insufficient to sustain current research activities let alone provide for any increased activities. This means less medical research will be conducted leading to fewer discoveries and, ultimately, fewer advancements in treatments and therapies for our nation’s children.
Fewer resources for medical research will also negatively impact the administration’s stated desires to improve the health of all Americans, including projects seeking to cure childhood illnesses to improve quality of life and productivity and eliminate chronic disease in adults. It is research supported by the NIH that has enabled us to make gains across multiple diseases and conditions over the past several decades, and it is a vibrant NIH that will enable us to achieve scientific breakthroughs and innovations tomorrow and for decades to come. We urge Congress to reject this drastic reduction in funding for the NIH and prevent the grave consequences and overall collateral damage that would arise.
Federal Indirect Costs
We are also troubled that the Administration is justifying the reduction in NIH funding largely by proposing a change in F&A rates to a flat 15 percent. As the Coalition has maintained since this was first proposed in early February, a flat one-size-fits-all federal F&A rate of 15 percent is simply unsustainable and fails to recognize how medical research has been supported over the past 80 years as well as the linchpin role federal F&A rates play in supporting our nation’s overall medical research ecosystem, including by sustaining invaluable research infrastructure that is leveraged by other funders.
The Coalition recognizes that there are concerns with the current model and has been actively engaging with other organizations seeking to put forward a revised federal indirect rate model. But while we recognize a need for some updates and reforms, we strongly oppose a single low rate for all institutions and research activities as well as justifying sharp reductions to the total NIH budget through this proposal. We urge Congress to continue to prohibit such a unilateral change and to instead work with all stakeholders to develop an updated model to funding indirect costs that addresses points of concerns while maintaining the core of the system.
Institute and Center Elimination and Consolidation
Finally, we strongly oppose eliminating some and consolidating other Institutes and Centers, including what has been proposed for the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and lumping children into an even larger Institute focused on a range of other populations and research topics. The already broad mission of the NICHD has at times created challenges in ensuring that child health research is appropriately prioritized and coordinated. In response to those concerns, several years ago the NIH established the NIH Pediatric Research Consortium (N-PeRC) to better coordinate child health research activities across all Institutes and Centers. Rather than eliminate NICHD and further dilute the focus on pediatrics, we need NIH to deepen this commitment.
As we stated last year when Congress began to contemplate such a reorganization, any such changes must be carefully considered and evaluated in an open and transparent manner before relevant Congressional committees. This approach was very much the case when Congress enacted past NIH reforms, such as the 2006 NIH reform law and changes made via the 21st Century Cures Act in 2016. The Coalition would welcome a free and open discussion about the optimal structure of the NIH including how to best support child health and lifespan research. But eliminating Institutes and Centers and consolidating others via the budget process absent any meaningful dialogue is not appropriate. We urge Congress to oppose these cuts and consolidations. And if there is serious interest in revisiting the structure of the NIH, we urge the appropriate committees to fully study the topic and to work with all stakeholders to develop resulting legislation.
Thank you for considering these points. We welcome any questions, and we look forward to serving as a resource as needed.