The U.S. House of Representatives has released preliminary spending bills for the 2025 fiscal year that contain grim news for science agencies. The National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) budget would rise only slightly after crashing this year, whereas NASA’s would be flat. And the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would face a flat budget, a drastic overhaul of its structure, and a ban on so-called gain-of-function (GOF) research.
A bill released today would hold NIH’s 2025 budget to this year’s level of $48 million. That falls short of the $700 million, 2% increase proposed by President Joe Biden. The bill also includes a plan released 2 weeks ago by the House commerce committee to collapse NIH’s 27 institutes and centers into 15 institutes.
Among other changes, the 2-year-old Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, an independent agency within NIH, would be folded into a new NIH institute along with several other institutes and programs. Its current $1.5 billion budget would be cut to $500 million, with the $1 billion distributed across other institutes.
The bill also includes a ban on funding for GOF research. That term is often used to describe risky experiments on viruses that could make them more likely to cause a pandemic. But with no such qualifiers, the language could bar funding for a vast swath of microbiology research, including work on low-risk viruses and drug and vaccine development, microbiologists say.
“An outright ban on gain-of-function research is irresponsible and will undermine the work this bill purports to support,” says Allen Segal, chief strategy and public affairs officer for the American Society for Microbiology.
Under a separate bill approved this morning by a different House spending panel, NSF would see its budget rise by 2%, to $9.26 billion. But that is nearly $1 billion less than Biden’s request, and well below the $9.8 billion the agency received in 2023. The spending panel has proposed adding $470 million to NSF’s $7.1 billion research account while cutting its education programs by $172 million, to $1 billion.
The budget for NASA’s science programs would remain flat at $7.33 billion, rather than getting the $7.56 billion Biden requested. And the tiny budget of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) would take a 30% hit, from $7.7 million to $5.5 million.
The bill would also block OSTP from carrying out a 2022 directive that would require free public access to papers and data produced by federally funded grantees, with these research products posted in public repositories starting at the end of 2025. The Republican-controlled House had sought the same ban last year, but the provision was removed in a compromise with the Democratic-led Senate.
At the Census Bureau, legislators want to impose drastic restrictions on the agency’s ability to get an accurate tally of U.S. residents during the decennial census and the numerous surveys it conducts. The bill would limit the bureau to one follow-up query for people they’ve been unable to reach, and make participation in surveys voluntary. The bureau now tries as many as six times to track down residents for the decennial head count before applying other methods to ensure coverage of undercounted populations and regions.
The bill would also prevent the Census Bureau from including noncitizens in the state totals used to apportion seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The language is part of a broader effort by Republicans to change the current constitutional requirement to count every U.S. resident in the census, which provides a baseline for creating congressional districts and allocating more than $1 trillion in federal and state funds.
Other provisions of the House bill released today would slash spending by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by 22%, a $1.7 billion cut. Funding would be shifted away from “social engineering” and toward infectious diseases, according to a press release.
Segal says the bill “would fundamentally reshape America’s research and public health infrastructure, with potentially devasting consequences. Reforming agencies like NIH and CDC should be part of a legislative process which includes stakeholder input, rather than occurring through the appropriations process.”
House Republican leaders have pledged to complete work on all 12 spending bills by mid-July. The Senate is expected to start adopting its spending plans next month. The two bodies will then negotiate final bills for the next fiscal year, which starts on 1 October. But that might not happen until after the November elections determine which party holds the White House and each chamber of Congress.
