BREAKING: White House Releases Budget Proposal, Slashing HHS Agencies
On May 2, the White House, through its Office of Management and Budget, released its proposed 2026 budget, and it includes huge cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services. As Reuters’ Ahmed Aboulenein wrote on Friday afternoon, “The White House wants to reduce U.S. health spending by more than a quarter next year, with the National Institutes of Health and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention facing the brunt of billions of dollars in cuts. President Donald Trump's administration on Friday proposed a $163 billion cut to the federal budget that would sharply reduce spending in areas including health, education, and housing next year, while increasing outlays for defense and border security.”
Indeed, Aboulenein wrote, “The proposed budget requests $93.8 billion for the Department of Health and Human Services - a cut of $33.3 billion, or 26.2 percent—from this year's budget of $127 billion."
It includes a cut of $18 billion, or 40 percent of the money allocated to the NIH, leaving it with a $27 billion budget. The White House wants to cut funding altogether for four of the agency's 27 institutes and centers and consolidate the remaining ones into five new institutes.
In addition, as the Washington Post’s Jeff Stein and Jacob Bogage wrote on Friday afternoon, “The White House would cut the budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by at least 40 percent, to about $4 billion. Administration officials have said they want the Atlanta-based agency to focus on emerging and infectious-disease surveillance and outbreak investigations. Despite Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s concerns about chronic disease, the budget document eliminates entirely CDC’s chronic disease programs, such as smoking, heart disease, diabetes and cancer prevention.”
As the New York Times’s Tony Room wrote on Friday afternoon, “Mr. Trump’s $1.7 trillion blueprint illustrates his conservative vision for Washington and formalizes the disruptive reorganization that he commenced upon returning to office, a campaign that has already shuttered entire agencies and dismissed federal workers without the explicit approval of Congress.”
Further, he noted, “The 2026 budget proposal recommends stunning cuts across nearly every major agency that would reduce overall domestic spending to the lowest level of the modern era. House Speaker Mike Johnson swiftly endorsed it. ‘Our country cannot continue to bear the hard consequences of years of runaway spending under Democratic leadership,” he said, “and this budget makes clear that fiscal discipline is nonnegotiable.’”
The notations in the text of the proposed budget reflect Trump administration policies and perspectives. With regard to the proposed CDC cuts, the text reads thus: “The Budget refocuses CDC’s mission on core activities such as emerging and infectious disease surveillance, outbreak investigations, and maintaining the Nation’s public health infrastructure, while streamlining programs and eliminating waste. The Budget proposes merging multiple programs into one grant program and giving States more flexibility to address local needs. Specifically, the Budget proposes consolidating funding for Infectious Disease and Opioids, Viral Hepatitis, Sexually Transmitted Infections, and Tuberculosis programs into one grant program funded at $300 million. The Budget eliminates duplicative, DEI, or simply unnecessary programs, including: the National Center for Chronic Diseases Prevention and Health Promotion; National Center for Environmental Health; National Center for Injury Prevention and Control; the Global Health Center; Public Health Preparedness and Response, which can be conducted more effectively by States; and the Preventive Health and Human Services Block Grant, the purposes for which can be best funded by States. The Budget refocuses CDC on emerging and infectious disease surveillance, outbreak investigations, preparedness and response, and maintaining the Nation’s public health infrastructure. The Budget maintains more than $4 billion for CDC.”
And, with regard to the massive cuts at NIH, the administration writes that “The Administration is committed to restoring accountability, public trust, and transparency at the NIH. 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. While evidence of the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic leaking from a laboratory is now confirmed by several intelligence agencies, the NIH’s inability to prove that its grants to the Wuhan Institute of Virology were not complicit in such a possible leak, or get data and hold recipients of Federal funding accountable is evidence that NIH has grown too big and unfocused. Further, the NIH has been involved in dangerous gain-of-function research and failed to adequately address it, which further undermines public confidence in NIH. The NIH has also promoted radical gender ideology to the detriment of America’s youth.”
The White House is also proposing $129 million in cuts to the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), representing at least one-quarter of its current budget. Per that, OMB wrote that “AHRQ is supposed to support research to examine the quality, safety, and affordability of healthcare delivery from the perspectives of patients, caregivers, and clinical professionals. However, much of its research is wasteful or duplicative of research conducted elsewhere in the Department, such as NIH. The Budget eliminates funding for duplicative and wasteful grants and contracts, including those not aligned with the Administration’s priorities. The previous administration used AHRQ to publish information wholly unrelated to MAHA, including a document titled, “Reducing Healthcare Carbon Emissions: A Primer on Measures and Actions to Mitigate Climate Change.” AHRQ has also pushed radical gender ideology onto children, funding a project at the Seattle Children’s Hospital titled, “Using Telehealth to Improve Access to Gender-Affirming Care for BIPOC and Rural Gender-Diverse Youth.” The Budget increases accountability by prioritizing AHRQ’s statistical work, eliminates the digital health portfolio, ends new grants, and offloads contracts and interagency agreements not associated with statistical activities. In the Budget, consistent with the recent announcement of HHS reorganization, AHRQ’s functions are now a part of the new HHS Office of Strategy.
On the other side of the ledger, the White House proposes budgeting $500 million for “MAHA”—“Make America Healthy Again”—a pet project of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., which would focus on promoting nutrition and exercise. STAT News’s Isabella Cueto reported on April 29 that the focus of “MAHA,” based on the commission that Kennedy is planning to impanel to promote his aims, will be “the American diet, absorption of toxic material, medical treatments, lifestyle, environmental factors, Government policies, food production techniques, electromagnetic radiation, and corporate influence or cronyism.”
Responding to the release of the White House budget proposal, leaders at the Atlanta-based Georgia Budget & Policy Institute (GBPI), released a statement on Friday afternoon. It included this statement, noting “more than $33 billion in cuts to Health and Human Services (HHS), which represents a reduction of 26% overall. This includes cutting funding for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) by more than 50 percent, from approximately $9 billion to $4 billion. Many of these cuts will be borne by our fellow Georgians, with the vast majority of the CDC’s employees in metro Atlanta; these cuts also reduce Georgia’s stagnant and insufficient public health funding, leaving rural communities more vulnerable to chronic conditions and to future pandemics.”
Further, Staci Fox, GBPI’s president and CEO, stated that “The White House budget proposal is likely to cause substantial harm to rural Georgians and those experiencing poverty, with significant funding cuts to public health, public education and more,” said Staci Fox, President and CEO at the Georgia Budget and Policy Institute. “Decisionmakers at the federal level have an opportunity to pursue a path that supports Georgians, following a roadmap to opportunity for the state and stewarding federal funds to help ensure a strong future for our children. Compared to other states, Georgians are already hungrier, sicker, and have fewer pathways to economic security, especially in rural areas. The cuts proposed in the White House Budget proposal would aggravate those conditions, even as trade war measures reduce the value of every rural Georgian’s hard-earned dollar.”
Meanwhile, though the specific amounts of potential cuts to the Medicaid program are not yet known—the White House’s proposed budget does not cover Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, or other essential areas, which will have to be worked out in Congress, but instead, only what is considered “discretionary” federal spending—numbers have been circulating around Capitol Hill for some time, including the figure that the administration itself has mentioned, of potentially $880 billion in cuts to Medicaid federal support. The leaders at the Washington, D.C.-based America’s Essential Hospitals released the following statement on Wednesday afternoon, April 30, anticipating major cuts: “America’s Essential Hospitals on April 30 sent a letter to congressional leaders, signed by 330 member systems, hospitals, and affiliated partners, urging lawmakers to reject any proposed cuts to Medicaid, including policies targeting Medicaid state directed payments and provider taxes, as well as changes to the federal medical assistance percentage, the Medicaid expansion population, per capita caps, and work requirements. The letter emphasizes the critical role that Medicaid plays in ensuring access to health care and highlights the potential consequences of funding reductions on patient care, hospital operations, and local economies.”
Further, the America’s Essential Hospitals leaders wrote, “Medicaid is a lifeline for more than 79 million Americans, including children, pregnant women, people with disabilities, and those in long-term care facilities. The proposed Medicaid policies that Congress is considering would lead to the elimination of health insurance coverage for millions of beneficiaries, including those who rely on Medicaid for essential and mental health services, undermining the foundational mission of Medicaid and jeopardizing the health and economic stability of our communities.”
