Under pressure from Congress, President Donald Trump’s administration has reversed course after halting spending at the National Institutes of Health.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle had been clamoring for cash to flow while warning that the White House budget office’s decisions have been contributing to a chaotic state of affairs that agitated elected officials in states where jobs rely on NIH dollars.
Budget officials at NIH announced internally Tuesday that the White House was barring the agency from disbursing funds on things like research and training.
Following a swift outcry on Capitol Hill, the Office of Management and Budget then confirmed that all NIH funding for biomedical and public health research had been released, chalking up the freeze to “a programmatic review.”
Congress’ top Democratic appropriators, Washington Sen. Patty Murray and Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro, called on the White House to end the freeze late Tuesday night.
“This administration is lying about waste, fraud, and abuse at NIH to justify attacking medical research,” Murray said in a statement.
The pausing of that money also followed a letter last week where 14 Republican senators asked White House budget director Russ Vought to release the funding signed into law by Trump in March, citing the slow disbursement to research centers across the country.
Suspending the funds, the lawmakers warned, “could threaten Americans’ ability to access better treatments and limit our nation’s leadership in biomedical science,” and “risks inadvertently severing ongoing NIH-funded research prior to actionable results.”
Over the weekend, Vought said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” that NIH needed a “dramatic overhaul” and that “we’re going to have to go line by line to make sure the NIH is funded properly.”
Jennifer Scholtes contributed to this report.
