Supporters of U.S. neuroscience research sent a letter to Congress last week asking for increased funding for the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative in the face of one of the program’s funding streams coming to end.
In the letter, 150 organizations asked Congress to appropriate $468 million for the BRAIN Initiative for the coming fiscal year. That amount, the same that BRAIN received from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2022, would offset the impending funding gap and result in the program’s largest budget since 2023, when it peaked at $680 million.
The BRAIN Initiative launched in 2013 and has been supported through both the 21st Century Cures Act and base NIH funding for the past 10 years. But Cures Act funding ends after fiscal year 2026, meaning that BRAIN needs a significant boost in base funding compared with the past three years to keep its budget steady.
The end of Cures Act funding was not a surprise, says Alice Luo Clayton, chief executive officer of the McKnight Brain Research Foundation and former senior science adviser for the BRAIN Initiative. “But it is certainly happening in the context of an incredibly uncertain and sort of volatile situation.”
Even before NIH funding uncertainty ramped up last year, a drop in Cures Act funding combined with static base funding led to an effective 40 percent cut to the BRAIN budget for fiscal year 2024. For 2025, that amount dropped even further—a blow that fell alongside other setbacks for U.S. researchers, including canceled federal grants and an unusually slow dispensation of promised funds. And although 2026 saw a slight increase in BRAIN and NIH funding, researchers expressed concern about how far the budget could stretch under a stated policy to fund some grants over multiple years upfront.
“We can never lose sight of the fact that the research that’s done today turns into treatments for tomorrow. And if we don’t do the investments today, we’re not going to be able to see the treatments tomorrow,” says Jennifer French, chair of the board of directors for the American Brain Coalition, which coordinated the letter to Congress.
The American Brain Coalition also plans to hold a congressional briefing on 22 April to showcase scientific breakthroughs, new technologies and clinical advances that have emerged from BRAIN funding, French says.
“We are optimistic that Congress will hear our call,” she says.
