Trump’s 2026 budget proposal: Crippling cuts for science across the board
Budget document derides research and science-based policy as “woke,” “scams.”
On Friday, the US Office of Management and Budget sent Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), chair of the Senate’s Appropriations Committee, an outline of what to expect from the Trump administration’s 2026 budget proposal. As expected, the budget includes widespread cuts, affecting nearly every branch of the federal government.
In keeping with the administration’s attacks on research agencies and the places research gets done, research funding will be taking an enormous hit, with the National Institutes of Health taking a 40 percent cut and the National Science Foundation losing 55 percent of its 2025 budget. But the budget goes well beyond those highlighted items, with nearly every place science gets done or funded targeted for cuts.
Perhaps even more shocking is the language used to justify the cuts, which reads more like a partisan rant than a serious budget document.
Health cuts
Having a secretary of Health and Human Services who doesn’t believe in germ theory is not likely to do good things for US health programs, and the proposed budget will only make matters worse. Kennedy’s planned MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) program would be launched with half a billion in funds, but nearly everything else would take a cut.
The CDC would lose about $3.6 billion from its current budget of $9.6 billion, primarily due to the shuttering of a number of divisions within it: the National Center for Chronic Diseases Prevention and Health Promotion, the National Center for Environmental Health, the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, and the Global Health Center and its division of Public Health Preparedness and Response. The duties of those offices are, according to the budget document, “duplicative, DEI, or simply unnecessary.”
Another big hit to HHS comes from the termination of a $4 billion program that helps low-income families cover energy costs. The OMB suggests that these costs will get lower due to expanded energy production and, anyway, the states should be paying for it. Shifting financial burdens to states is a general theme of the document, an approach that will ultimately hit the poorest states hardest, even though these had very high percentages of Trump voters.
The document also says that “This Administration is committed to combatting the scourge of deadly drugs that have ravaged American communities,” while cutting a billion dollars from substance abuse programs within HHS.
But the headline cuts come from the National Institutes of Health, the single largest source of scientific funding in the world. NIH would see its current $48 billion budget chopped by $18 billion and its 27 individual institutes consolidated down to just five. This would result in vast cutbacks to US biomedical research, which is currently acknowledged to be world-leading. Combined with planned cuts to grant overheads, it will cause most research institutions to shrink, and some less well-funded universities may be forced to close facilities.
The justification for the cuts is little more than a partisan rant: “NIH has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health.” The text then implies that the broken trust is primarily the product of failing to promote the idea that SARS-CoV-2 originated in a lab, even though there’s no scientific evidence to indicate that it had.
Climate research hit
The National Science Foundation funds much of the US’s fundamental science research, like physics and astronomy. Earlier reporting that it would see a 56 percent cut to its budget was confirmed. “The Budget cuts funding for: climate; clean energy; woke social, behavioral, and economic sciences; and programs in low priority areas of science.” Funding would be maintained for AI and quantum computing. All funding for encouraging minority participation in the sciences will also be terminated. The budget was released on the same day that the NSF announced it was joining other science agencies in standardizing on paying 15 percent of its grants’ value for maintaining facilities and providing services to researchers, a cut that would further the financial damage to research institutions.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration would see $1.3 billion of its $6.6 billion budget cut, with the primary target being its climate change work. In fact, the budget for NOAA’s weather satellites will be cut to prevent them from including instruments that would make “unnecessary climate measurements.” Apparently, the Administration doesn’t want anyone to be exposed to data that might challenge its narrative that climate change is a scam.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology would lose $350 million for similar reasons. “NIST has long funded awards for the development of curricula that advance a radical climate agenda,” the document suggests, before going on to say that the Institute’s Circular Economy Program, which promotes the efficient reuse of industrial materials, “pushes environmental alarmism.”
The Department of Energy is seeing a $1.1 billion hit to its science budget, “eliminating funding for Green New Scam interests and climate change-related activities.” The DOE will also take hits to policy programs focused on climate change, including $15 billion in cuts to renewable energy and carbon capture spending. Separately, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy will also take a $2.6 billion hit. Over at the Department of the Interior, the US Geological Survey would see its renewable energy programs terminated, as well.
Some of the DOE’s other cuts, however, don’t even make sense given the administration’s priorities. The newly renamed Office of Fossil Energy—something that Trump favors—will still take a $270 million hit, and nuclear energy programs will see $400 million in cuts.
This sort of lack of self-awareness shows up several times in the document. In one striking case, an interior program funding water infrastructure improvements is taking a cut that “reduces funding for programs that have nothing to do with building and maintaining water infrastructure, such as habitat restoration.” Apparently, the OMB is unaware that functioning habitats can help provide ecosystem services that can reduce the need for water infrastructure.
Similarly, over at the EPA, they’re boosting programs for clean drinking water by $36 million, while at the same time cutting loans to states for clean water projects by $2.5 billion. “The States should be responsible for funding their own water infrastructure projects,” the OMB declares. Research at the EPA also takes a hit: “The Budget puts an end to unrestrained research grants, radical environmental justice work, woke climate research, and skewed, overly-precautionary modeling that influences regulations—none of which are authorized by law.”
An attack on scientific infrastructure
US science couldn’t flourish without an educational system that funnels talented individuals into graduate programs. So, naturally, funding for those is being targeted as well. This is partially a function of the administration’s intention to eliminate the Department of Education, but there also seems to be a specific focus on programs that target low-income individuals.
For example, the GEAR UP program describes itself as “designed to increase the number of low-income students who are prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education.” The OMB document describes it as “a relic of the past when financial incentives were needed to motivate Institutions of Higher Education to engage with low-income students and increase access.” It goes on to claim that this is “not the obstacle it was for students of limited means.”
Similarly, the SEOG program funding is “awarded to an undergraduate student who demonstrates exceptional financial need.” In the OMB’s view, colleges and universities “have used [it] to fund radical leftist ideology instead of investing in students and their success.” Another cut is claimed to eliminate “Equity Assistance Centers that have indoctrinated children.” And “The Budget proposes to end Federal taxpayer dollars being weaponized to indoctrinate new teachers.”
In addition, the federal work-study program, which subsidizes on-campus jobs for needy students, is also getting a billion-dollar cut. Again, the document says that the states can pay for it.
(The education portion also specifically cuts the funding of Howard University, which is both distinct as a federally supported Black university and also notable as being where Kamala Harris got her first degree.)
The end of US leadership
This budget is a recipe for ending the US’s leadership in science. It would do generational damage by forcing labs to shut down, with a corresponding loss of highly trained individuals and one-of-a-kind research materials. At the same time, it will throttle the educational pipeline that could eventually replace those losses. Given that the US is one of the major sources of research funding in the world, if approved, the budget will have global consequences.
To the people within the OMB who prepared the document, these are not losses. The document makes it very clear that they view many instances of scientific thought and evidence-based policy as little more than forms of ideological indoctrination, presumably because the evidence sometimes contradicts what they’d prefer to believe.
John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.
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