As Congress wrangles over a budget for the 2025 federal fiscal year, which begins October 1, the NIH will be paying especially close attention. Last year, the NIH saw its first year-over-year funding decrease since FY 2013, a $569.5 million or 1% dip that resulted in program-level funding of $47.1 billion. The reduction largely reflected a cut in funds authorized for the 21st Century Cures Act NIH Innovation Account, which shrunk 62.5% to $407 million in FY 2024 from nearly $1.1 billion the previous fiscal year. In March, President Biden proposed a FY 2025 spending plan that set aside $50.1 billion for the NIH, up 6.3% or just over $3 billion from the FY 2024 level.
A declaration of purpose
“We will continue to foster research that is responsive to new and ongoing health issues,” stated NIH director Monica M. Bertagnolli, MD, in the agency’s budget proposal. “Families across the country are grappling with new cancer diagnoses, facing high rates of maternal mortality, struggling with ill health from long COVID, losing loved ones to the opioid overdose crisis, and struggling to manage chronic diseases, among many other challenges.”
A restructuring proposal
In August, the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations approved 0.5% more for the NIH, bringing the agency to $50.35 billion. That total accounted for yet another planned cut in funding authorization for NIH Innovation Projects, set to fall another 69% to $127 million in FY 2025.
The Senate version of the NIH budget is 3.6% more than the $48.581 billion provided to the agency by the House Committee on Appropriations in July.
In June, two House Republican leaders—Rep. Robert Aderholt (AL), chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education; and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (WA), chair of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce—proposed a restructuring of NIH that would reduce its 27 institutes and centers to 15.
In a commentary, Aderholt and Rodgers argued that an NIH restructuring would restore trust in the NIH after the “agency’s involvement with the now-debarred EcoHealth Alliance and subsequent cover-up.” EcoHealth, a nonprofit organization that received NIH funding, had its ties with the Wuhan Institute of Technology scrutinized in the aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak. EcoHealth has vowed to fight the debarment and has denied assertions by House Republicans that it and its president lied to Congress.
Aderholt and Rodgers also contend that an NIH restructuring would prevent risky research, such as plans to insert segments of a lethal strain of Mpx virus into a more transmissible strain of the virus—plans disclosed in Science by Bernard Moss, MD, PhD, chief of the Genetic Engineering Section at the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
This year’s top 50 institutions
We have ranked 50 institutions—universities, medical schools, research organizations, and teaching hospitals—according to how much NIH funding they had received as of September 2 in FY 2024, which ends on September 30. Also included for each NIH grant recipient is the number of grant awards funded in FY 2024, though the number was not a factor in the ranking.
This year, 26 states have institutions ranked among the top 50, two more than GEN’s last NIH funding A-List, which was presented in 2022. California and New York co-lead the nation with seven NIH-funded institutions. Next highest is Massachusetts with four institutions, followed by North Carolina with three. Another seven states received NIH grants for two institutions each (Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington state). The other 15 states have a single NIH-funded institution among the top 50 institutions listed here.
Some notable institutions are ranked 51 through 55 this fiscal year. They are, in order, as follows: the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Scripps Research Institute (CA), Harvard Medical School (MA), Boston University Medical Campus (MA), and University of Illinois at Chicago. (MD Anderson just missed the top 50 with $143,402,070 through 281 awards.)
