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On April 3, the White House released the initial details of its Fiscal Year 2027 budget proposal. The document represents the President’s spending and policy priorities and serves as a starting position for the Administration’s negotiations with Congress. Congress never accepts the President’s budget in its entirety. Instead, Congress uses the proposal to inform its deliberations as it drafts the 12 appropriations bills that fund all federal agencies. 

The budget is released in several parts, including tables and narratives, or congressional justifications (CJs), which provide additional details about the Administration’s request. As of the second week of April, some CJs had not been released for several agencies important to PAA, such as the U.S. Census Bureau.  On April 10, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) released its FY 2027 CJ. 

Despite some of the missing details, the initial budget release includes several concerning policy provisions, including the elimination of three of the NIH Institutes and Centers—National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities, Fogarty International Center, and National Center on Complementary and Integrative Health.  Further, the budget reprises a proposal from last year to move the National Center for Health Statistics and most of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality into a new Office of Strategy within the Department of Health and Human Services. Congress rejected a similar proposal last year. Fortunately, this year’s budget does not repeat last year’s failed proposal to merge the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development with the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. 

Thus far, the most alarming proposal in the President’s budget is a plan to dismantle the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, which the agency has already apparently begun implementing. The plan states the agency’s intention to “close-out” the SBE Directorate this year while transferring “continuing grants that align with Administration priorities, such as in behavioral and cognitive science, and all impacted employees” to “other parts of the agency.” It notes that the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics will continue to operate but independently. PAA will be working with its coalition partners, especially through the Consortium of Social Science Associations, to address this serious threat and offering members an opportunity to act. 

The table below summarizes the budget’s recommended funding levels for the major agencies that the PAA Office of Government and Public Affairs tracks. Of note, the President’s budget, just as it did in its FY 2026 submission, would significantly cut funding for U.S. science agencies—including a 55% cut to the NSF and a 13% cut to the NIH. The NIH cuts would include 6.9% and 7.3% reductions to NIA and NICHD, respectively, and large reductions in the number of new Research Project grants in FY 2027 due to again proposing to fully fund new multi-year grants in the initial grant award. To reiterate, Congress rarely, if ever, accepts the President’s budget, but PAA and the research community take nothing for granted and intend to work hard again this year to prevent drastic funding cuts to the scientific and statistical agencies that support the population sciences in the final Fiscal Year 2027 appropriations bills.