U.S. neuroscience research is on track for a funding increase, according to a pending congressional spending bill for the 2026 fiscal year.
The bill, released on Tuesday and currently before the House of Representatives, sets the 2026 National Institutes of Health budget at $47.2 billion, a $415 million increase from last year. It calls for the budget of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke to rise from $2.69 billion last year to $2.8 billion this year, although that of the National Institute of Mental Health drops from $2.27 billion to $2.19 billion, according to an analysis by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a nonprofit general scientific society based in Washington, D.C. The bill also includes a 33 percent increase for the BRAIN Initiative, which has sustained cuts over the past two years.
The bill is still subject to revisions; the House of Representatives plans to vote on it today, and the Senate is slated to do so next week when it returns from recess.
The modest boost to the NIH budget is not something that would be celebrated in most years, says Alessandra Zimmermann, budget and policy analyst for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But given President Trump’s 2026 budget request, which included a 40 percent cut to the NIH budget and a massive restructuring of the organization, things could have been worse, she says.
Still, there remains plenty to worry about, says Mark Histed, chief of the Unit on Neural Computation and Behavior at the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, who spoke to The Transmitter as a citizen and not in his capacity as an NIH employee.
For one, Histed says, the current bill continues to allow multiyear funding of grants at the 2025 level. This approach contributed to a 37 percent decrease in the number of neuroscience grants awarded last year compared with the previous year. It is “sort of a de facto way of cutting the NIH,” says Jeremy Berg, former director of the NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences.
Histed says neuroscientists should reach out to their representatives to tell them how the bill could affect the future of research. “This is a bad bill,” in that it does not go far enough, Histed says. “The funding goes up a little bit, but it doesn’t prevent the chaos that we saw this past year.”
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The explanatory statement accompanying the bill outlines how the NIH should hire new directors of its institutes and centers (ICs). Of the 27 ICs, 13 are currently run by acting directors, following dismissals over the past year. Walter Koroshetz, director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, is also set to leave this week after he was not reinstated last month. The statement says that the hiring process should include “external scientists and stakeholders with appropriate subject matter expertise and familiarity with the relevant ICs.”
The statement also allocates $30 million for the renovation of existing or development of new primate research infrastructure.
And it directs the NIH to hold monthly briefings on its grant funding, Zimmermann notes. Although the statement is not legally binding, she says, “it’s showing that Congress is being more forceful about asserting its oversight authority than it has in the past.”
Researchers are still likely to struggle this year, says Jennifer Troyer, former director of extramural operations at the National Human Genome Research Institute. “Both the funding agencies and the labs doing research have lost so many people that it will be hard to get the work done this year even if budgets do rebound,” she says. “So, this is a positive development and should be celebrated, but no one should be under the impression that it puts back everything that has been broken.”
