At 4:20 p.m. on Wednesday, April 16, Washington Post reporters Lena H. Sun, Carolyn Y. Johnson, Rachel Roubein, Joel Achenbach, and Lauren Weber exclusively broke a report that “The Trump administration is seeking to deeply slash budgets for federal health programs, a roughly one-third cut in discretionary spending by the Department of Health and Human Services [HHS], according to a preliminary budget document obtained by The Washington Post."
According to the Post report, President Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget will send to Congress envisions paring the 2024 HHS discretionary budget of $121 billion to just $80 billion, while reorganizing a number of departments and agencies.
According to the draft document that the Post reporters have examined, they reported Wednesday evening that “The proposal would reduce the more than $47 billion budget of the NIH to $27 billion — a roughly 40 percent cut. It would consolidate NIH’s 27 institutes and centers into just eight. Some of its institutes and centers would be eliminated, including the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities and the National Institute of Nursing Research.” Further, “Many of NIH’s institutes would be fused. A National Institute on Body Systems, for example, would absorb three separate institutes: the institute focused on heart and lung diseases; the institute focused on diabetes, kidney and digestive disorders; and a third focused on muscle, skeletal and skin diseases.”
At the same time, the document envisions a new $20 billion agency would be created called the “Administration for a Healthy America,” which would absorb some of the areas focused on by present agencies, including primary care, environmental health, and HIV.
Another element in the envisioned budget: “The proposal would cut the CDC’s budget by about 44 percent, from $9.2 billion to about $5.2 billion, and would eliminate all of the agency’s chronic disease programs and domestic HIV work. The chronic disease programs being eliminated include work on heart disease, obesity, diabetes and smoking cessation.”
What’s more, according to the Post, “Rural programs formerly under the Health Resources and Services Administration appear to be hard-hit. The rural hospital flexibility grants, state offices of rural health, rural residency development program and at-risk rural hospitals program grants are listed as eliminations under AHA.”
And funding for the nationwide Head Start program would be completely zeroed out.
The full text of the article can be found here.
On Wednesday evening, The Hill’s Nathaniel Weixel published a follow-up report on the heels of the Post’s article. Weixel noted that, “To achieve the massive savings, the draft budget would recommend eliminating entire agencies, like the Substance Use and Mental Health Services Administration and Health Resources and Services Administration. When asked for comment, Office of Management and Budget spokesperson Rachel Cauley said, ‘no final funding decisions have been made.’”
