KVIG Informative

Lawmakers rejected the White House’s push for the deepest cuts to federal science funding in decades, but a new bottleneck is now keeping much of that money from reaching researchers at all.

Congress rejected the Trump administration’s fiscal 2026 budget request, which sought a 57% cut to the National Science Foundation and a 41% cut to the National Institutes of Health, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. Lawmakers instead signed a January spending package that held NSF’s budget at $8.75 billion, a 3.4% decrease from the prior year, and gave NIH a roughly 1% increase to $48.7 billion, according to Chemistry World.

Yet the money is not reaching labs at the pace it normally would. As of late March, roughly six months into the fiscal year, NIH had obligated just $5.8 billion of its $38 billion extramural research budget — about 15% — compared with nearly $9 billion obligated at the same point in fiscal year 2025.

NSF’s pipeline has slowed even further. The agency had funded 613 new grants by mid-April, roughly one-fifth of the 3,000-plus it typically funds by that point in the year, and the dollar value of those awards ran at about one-third of historical norms, according to data compiled by the advocacy group Grant Witness and reported by the American Physical Society.

Part of the delay traces to the record 43-day government shutdown that closed the federal government from October 1 to November 12, 2025, followed by a second, shorter shutdown when a temporary funding measure expired January 31. NIH could not distribute funds for the first seven weeks of the fiscal year.

NSF has also restructured its own grant review process, cutting the minimum number of outside peer reviews per proposal from three to two and allowing agency staff, rather than independent reviewers, to conduct one of them — changes the agency attributed to a proposal backlog and workforce reductions.

The slowdown comes as NSF has also redirected funding internally: the agency is trimming budgets for hundreds of traditional basic-science programs by 20% to 30% or more, even though its overall budget fell just 3%, in order to fund a new $1.5 billion initiative aimed at commercializing NSF-backed discoveries, according to reporting in the journal Science.

For now, the fight isn’t over. The administration’s fiscal 2027 budget request again seeks steep cuts — 13% at NIH and 55% at NSF — meaning the agencies still processing this year’s backlog are simultaneously bracing for another round of the same argument.