Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Activists hold signs during a rally outside the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, May 10, 2025.
While Senate Republicans try to work out the political and fiscal contradictions in the big beautiful budget bill, most of the attention has gone to Medicaid and SNAP cuts, the cap on the deductions for state and local taxes, and the increase in the national debt. But a sleeper issue is the proposed 40 percent cut to the National Institutes of Health, in the White House’s proposed budget for the next fiscal year.
The proposed cut would decrease the NIH budget from nearly $48.5 billion to $27.5 billion, and freeze most new grants. It would also consolidate the agency’s 27 institutes and centers into eight.
NIH is substantially responsible for U.S. leadership in biotech, pharmaceuticals, as well as medical research and treatment breakthroughs. Its grants have been a key source of support to research universities and their economic spin-offs. Every dollar of NIH funding generates about $2.54 in economic activity. In the past, NIH funding has never been a partisan issue.
President Trump has used his executive power to slash NIH grants to universities he doesn’t like, such as Harvard, and to savage so-called DEI. These executive abuses are now in court. But the courts cannot challenge general cuts in the NIH appropriations—only Congress can. And while it has always been hard to grasp Trump’s motives, destroying NIH as an end in itself makes even less sense than his assaults on most federal agencies.
At least five Republican senators have expressed serious qualms about the NIH cuts. Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, warned in February that the proposed $18 billion cuts “would be devastating, stopping vital biomedical research and leading to the loss of jobs.” She has also questioned NIH’s cap in payments for indirect costs on research grants, a key source of subsidy to universities.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), head of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that oversees the NIH budget, has echoed Collins. Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Katie Britt (R-AL) have expressed concern about the impact of the proposed cuts on their states’ economies.
One interesting player in this under-the-radar battle is Pennsylvania’s freshman senator, Dave McCormick. More than most U.S. cities, Pittsburgh has reinvented its postindustrial economy around “eds and meds”—universities, hospitals, and biomedical research.
The University of Pennsylvania and the University of Pittsburgh are typically number four and number five nationally in NIH funding and are among the top five employers in the state. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is Pennsylvania’s second-largest employer.
Pennsylvania will be one of the top three states hurt most by the cuts in NIH funding if they go through. McCormick is a pivotal player, because he is not a hard-right Trumper and he has a connection to higher education as well as finance. His father served as president of Bloomsburg University and as chancellor for the Pennsylvania state system of higher education. He has also worked across the aisle with Pennsylvania’s Democratic senator, John Fetterman, on several issues. Since McCormick was just elected in 2024 and will not be up again until 2030, there is no immediate threat that he would be primaried by a MAGA opponent, especially over an issue so important to his state.
As the Senate works against Trump’s July 4 deadline to square several impossible circles, and a September deadline for the FY 2026 budget, McCormick is being pressed by Pennsylvania’s biomedical industries, researchers, and educators to play a major role in reversing the proposed NIH cuts. My sources say McCormick has indicated sympathy for saving NIH, though he has yet to speak out.
Let’s hope he does. If the five Republican Senate critics of disabling cuts work together, they can spare NIH. It’s another urgent area where the budget bill deserves to fall of its own weight.
