The White House on April 3 transmitted to Congress a fiscal year 2027 budget request that would reduce the National Science Foundation by nearly 55 percent, cut the National Institutes of Health by approximately $5 billion, and impose a government-wide prohibition on using federal funds for academic journal subscriptions and publishing fees — a sweeping reassertion of the administration’s intent to redirect the American research enterprise toward a narrower set of national priorities even as lawmakers signaled they are unlikely to comply.
For the second consecutive year, the administration is asking Congress to make deep cuts to federal research spending, according to Science magazine, which reported that the proposal includes a 55 percent cut to NSF, a 23 percent cut to NASA, a 15 percent cut to the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and a 12 percent cut to NIH. The plan simultaneously requests $1.5 trillion for defense — a 44 percent increase over the fiscal 2026 enacted level — concentrating the republic’s fiscal ambitions with unmistakable clarity on military readiness and technological dominance in the fields the administration considers strategically paramount.
The proposed NSF budget of $4 billion, down from its current $8.8 billion, would reduce the nation’s primary funder of basic research across all scientific disciplines to a scale not seen in decades. According to Scientific American, the proposal eliminates all funding for the NSF division that supports research in the social sciences and economics. At an internal all-hands meeting on Friday, NSF leaders announced they would dissolve the agency’s Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences directorate based on the budget request, according to two NSF staff members cited by the publication. The NSF’s own budget document to Congress confirms that in fiscal 2027 the agency will “close-out this directorate,” transferring continuing grants that “align with Administration priorities, such as in behavioral and cognitive science” to other parts of the agency.
Two research areas the administration considers top priorities — artificial intelligence and quantum computing — would receive nearly one-quarter of NSF’s reduced total, with $655 million allocated to AI and $231 million to quantum computing, according to Science. Each of NSF’s eight research directorates would face reductions, as would the Office of Polar Programs. The University of Washington’s Office of Federal Relations reported that STEM education programs at NSF would be cut by 86 percent, from $1.1 billion to $151 million — a figure that, if enacted, would decimate the pipeline of trained researchers upon which American technological supremacy depends.
The NIH, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, would see its budget reduced by approximately $5 billion to roughly $41 billion, according to STAT News and the University of Washington. The administration’s budget document states that NIH “broke the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health,” according to Science. The proposal targets three NIH institutes for elimination: the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the Fogarty International Center, and the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, as reported by Nature. The remaining 24 centers would be consolidated further, with the budget also calling for a cap on indirect cost reimbursements to universities at 15 percent of a grant’s total — a provision Congress has repeatedly rejected.
United for Cures, a large coalition of patient advocacy organizations, condemned the request, with executive director Russ Paulsen arguing in a statement that the proposed cuts would “disrupt critical research” and stymie treatments for a range of diseases, as reported by Science. Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Susan Collins of Maine, a Republican, stated that the proposal has “several shortcomings,” citing “unwarranted funding cuts in biomedical research” among its deficiencies, according to her official committee statement. Senator Collins has been a persistent critic of administration proposals to reduce NIH spending, having previously called such cuts “so disturbing” and warned they risk the United States falling behind China in biomedical research.
Perhaps the most novel element of the budget is a government-wide prohibition on using federal funds for what the administration describes as expensive journal subscriptions and prohibitively high publishing costs. According to Nature, the proposal would prohibit spending of “Federal funds for expensive subscriptions to academic journals and prohibitively high publishing costs unless required by Federal statute or approved in advance by a Federal agency.” The budget document does not define “expensive” or “prohibitively high,” nor does it specify which journals would be affected, Scientific American reported. The White House contends that many journals “charge the Government to both publish and to access the same research study” and that “numerous low-cost outlets” exist for disseminating federally funded research, according to Federal News Network.
The publishing prohibition arrives in a broader context. Multiple federal agencies — including the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Energy, and NASA — canceled subscriptions to Springer Nature journals last year, as reported by Science and Nature. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. previously suggested he might ban the agency’s scientists from publishing in leading peer-reviewed medical journals, calling them “corrupt.” The NIH has separately been developing a policy to cap article processing charges — the fees journals charge to make articles freely available upon publication — a move that some researchers worry could limit where federally funded scientists can publish their work, according to Scientific American.
The budget also revives the administration’s proposal to close several smaller cultural and service agencies. According to Education Week, the plan reprises the pitch to shutter AmeriCorps, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities. The administration’s prior unilateral efforts to close these agencies without congressional approval have not gained favor with lawmakers or courts, the publication noted. Congress, in its fiscal 2026 appropriations, supplied funding for several of the agencies the administration had already moved to defund, including AmeriCorps and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, as Education Week reported earlier this year.
The Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences — the federal entity responsible for collecting education data and funding research — would see its budget slashed from more than $700 million to just $261 million under the proposal, according to Education Week. The same cut was proposed last year but rejected by Congress. The Education Department’s office for civil rights would lose roughly one-third of its current annual allocation.
The budget’s trajectory is clear: it channels the fiscal resources of the republic away from broad-spectrum civilian research and toward military modernization, applied defense technology, and a handful of frontier sciences — AI, quantum computing, fusion energy, and nuclear weapons design. This rebalancing carries strategic logic insofar as it reflects the pressures of a world in which the United States is engaged in active military operations and faces intensifying competition from peer adversaries. Yet the question Congress must weigh is whether hollowing out the basic research infrastructure that has sustained American scientific preeminence for three-quarters of a century serves or imperils the long-term national interest.
History offers guidance. Earlier this year, lawmakers largely rejected similarly steep cuts to science that the administration requested for fiscal 2026, as both Science and Nature reported. Congress gave NIH a modest boost rather than the requested 40 percent cut, and maintained funding for NOAA, the NEA, and the NEH at or near prior levels. The bipartisan character of that resistance was notable: Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Collins — among the most powerful Republicans in the chamber — was at its center. Whether that resistance holds for a second consecutive cycle, amid congressional elections in November and the competing pressures of wartime defense spending, will determine whether the architecture of American science endures or undergoes a transformation without precedent in the postwar era.
Alessandra Zimmermann, who tracks science budgets at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, told Scientific American that the administration plans to increase applied research funding for AI and quantum topics at the defense and energy departments — suggesting the administration views the competition with China not as a broad-front scientific contest but as a narrow technology race to be won through targeted investment. The budget proposal is a starting point for congressional negotiations that could extend well past the start of the fiscal year on October 1, Zimmermann noted.