Senate rejects Trump's cuts to the National Institutes of Health and approves agency's budget increase

The Senate Appropriations Committee formally rejected Thursday the budget cut that had been proposed by President Donald Trump's administration for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), advancing instead a measure that would increase the agency's budget by $400 million following a bipartisan 26-3 vote. The bill in question includes a $150 million increase for cancer research, $100 million more for Alzheimer's research, and a $30 million increase for the Office of Women's Health Research.

Although funding for other sectors within the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) was unchanged, the fact remains that what was concluded in the vote still remains far from the substantial cuts that have been proposed by the Trump Administration in recent weeks. Indeed, the panel also did not include the massive reorganization of HHS proposed by the White House, which would have created the Administration for a Healthy America (AHA), the goal of which would have been a focus on chronic disease prevention.

The Trump Administration's budget proposal originally posited that the AHA, which would be a new agency, would absorb other existing programs and agencies within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as well as the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, the Health Resources and Services Administration, and the entire Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.

While the White House's major proposals included an official appropriation of $20 billion for the AHA, Senators made no mention of this detail during the vote.