Trump Administration Scraps Effort to Pause Health-Research Funding
White House officials intervened to force budget office to reconsider health-research funding pause
Updated July 29, 2025 The Wall Street Journal
The funding halt would have impacted roughly $15 billion in NIH funding, according to an estimate from Senator Patty Murray.
A Trump administration effort to block all funding that flows to outside health researchers was scrapped Tuesday evening after senior White House officials intervened, people familiar with the matter said. The funds—billions of dollars to study diabetes, cancer and more—are set to flow again, the people said.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier Tuesday that an initial pause had come in the form of a footnote from the Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought’s office, in a document that doles out federal funds to the National Institutes of Health. The footnote stipulated that the agency’s funding for the remainder of the fiscal year could only go to staff salaries and expenses, not to new grants or certain grants that are up for renewal. Most NIH-funded research is done by outside scientists at labs across the country.
Officials from the Department of Health and Human Services spent the past several days fighting the funding pause, people familiar with the matter said. The OMB reversed course after the Journal’s story was published Tuesday, the people said.
The footnote put a halt on roughly $15 billion in NIH funding, according to an estimate from the office of Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.), vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee.
“This outrageous decision to prevent NIH from spending the funding that Congress has explicitly provided for medical research must immediately be reversed—life-changing cures and patients’ prognoses hang in the balance,” Murray said before the decision was known to have been reversed.
NIH officials sought to remove or alter the restriction Vought’s office placed on their funds, according to an email viewed by the Journal. The funding halt would have set up a battle with lawmakers, who have voiced concerns about slowed research funding.
“The Office of Management and Budget is undertaking a review of NIH spending, some of which is now temporarily paused,” said a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services before the pause was scrapped. “NIH’s Clinical Center, salaries and administrative costs are not affected by OMB’s spending review.”
OMB spokeswoman Rachel Cauley said this was a “programmatic review” of NIH funding. The funds were released, she said on Tuesday evening.
The White House didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment on the reversal.
The fourth quarter of the fiscal year is typically the busiest for grant-giving institutes at the NIH. It is the time when the largest number of grants are processed as the agency races to award all of its allotted funding before the fiscal year ends.
Under the Trump administration, the NIH has frozen or terminated billions of dollars in grants to universities. These include grants on certain topics deemed related to diversity initiatives that have been terminated with letters saying the grants don’t meet agency priorities.
Also, the NIH has been criticized by former administrators and research scientists for not issuing funds as speedily this year compared with previous years.
Vought, who holds an expansive view of presidential power, has threatened in the past not to spend congressionally appropriated funds, setting up tension between his office and lawmakers. He has been critical of certain research projects conducted by the NIH previously, noting that many of the efforts don’t fit with the administration’s policy views.
Vought has said the NIH needs “fundamental reform.”
Write to Liz Essley Whyte at liz.whyte@wsj.com, Nidhi Subbaraman at nidhi.subbaraman@wsj.com and Ken Thomas at ken.thomas@wsj.com
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Appeared in the July 30, 2025, print edition as 'Disease Research Funds Paused, Then Released'.
The Trump administration tried to block billions in NIH funding for outside health researchers, but senior White House officials intervened.
The Office of Management and Budget initially paused the funding, but reversed course after a Wall Street Journal story was published.