President Trump's FY27 Budget Request

The White House has released the President’s FY2027 Budget Request (PBR) to Congress. The request includes a $2.2 trillion base request in defense discretionary spending, a 28 percent increase from FY2026 and $660.1 billion in nondefense discretionary request, a 10 percent reduction from FY2026.

The President’s Budget Request proposes reductions and structural changes across major federal research and humanities agencies. Funding for the National Science Foundation would be cut by more than 50 percent to $4 billion, reducing grant funding across all divisions and eliminating the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences directorate and decreasing the number of funded awards. The National Institutes of Health would face a 12 percent reduction, accompanied by the elimination or consolidation of multiple institutes and centers including those focused on environmental health, global health, and substance use research. The FY27 PBR also proposes eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities, with remaining funds designated primarily for agency closeout activities and a limited number of previously approved or targeted awards. 

Although the President’s budget is an expression of the Administration’s priorities, Congress ultimately controls the appropriations process.  For FY26, Congress rejected cuts to NSF, NIH and NEH funding those agencies around the same amount as the enacted FY25 appropriations. As a note, the President’s FY 2026 budget request also proposed to terminate NEH with $38 million requested to conduct the shutdown and Congress funded NEH in FY26 with $207million.  Both the House and Senate have begun the FY27 budget process, soliciting programmatic and community-project requests from Members and they are beginning to hold hearings with agency representatives.