Under Trump, NIH funding disruptions have evolved. Here's what the numbers show

Experts say that though the National Institutes of Health's total budget suggests that little has changed for the agency and its grantees, that top line masks deeper disruptions. Eva Revolver for NPR hide caption

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) wields a $47.5 billion budget. More than 80% of its funds go out the door as grants to answer pressing biomedical questions. Over the decades, those grants have helped decipher the human genome, eliminate the polio virus in the U.S. and turn AIDS from a death sentence to a survivable illness.

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But experts say this kind of fundamental science is coming up against an administration that has delayed funding and rerouted billions of dollars in research, resulting in chaos for researchers and patients alike. Trump officials say the administration's practices serve to further the agency's goals.

"NIH is committed to responsible stewardship of taxpayer dollars and to advancing rigorous, high-impact science that improves health outcomes for the American people," Emily Hilliard, a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, wrote in an August email.

More political oversight may be coming to how those funds get dispersed, according to recent reports . For now, court cases have restored funding, and Congress has preserved it in successive budget bills. But for the scientists who have had to scrap time-sensitive experiments or have seen their labs shuttered, those top-line numbers do not tell the full story.

Here are six graphics that highlight some of the less visible impacts of changes in research funding at the NIH.

The Trump administration proposed cutting the NIH budget by 41%, or by about $19.6 billion, for 2026. It also asked to restructure 27 institutes to eight — eliminating four outright — in its request. Congress did neither; in fact, it maintained both the existing institutes and a budget that was on par with previous years' appropriations.