During our seminars and workshops over the last 12 months, many of you have expressed understandable concern about the future of federal funding—concerns we share. A recurring question has been what the proposed 2026 federal budget could mean for research programs. The good news is that a roughly $1.2 trillion appropriations package was passed by Congress and signed by the President on February 3, 2026, funding most of the federal government through September 30, 2026, and ending a brief partial shutdown. A key theme across the negotiations was that Congress largely rejected the steep cuts proposed in the President’s original FY 2026 budget request, particularly for research agencies. While this provides much-needed stability and funding continuity for many research agencies, the evolving funding landscape still requires careful monitoring of programmatic priorities, adaptability, and strategic alignment with emerging opportunities. Below is a closer look at how several key research agencies fared under the FY 2026 appropriations.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) received a modest but widely welcomed budget increase. The appropriations bill provided roughly $48.7 billion, about $400 million above FY 2025. The President’s budget proposal had called for reducing the NIH funding to about $24.5 billion for FY 2026, but Congress did not adopt those cuts. Instead, lawmakers preserved the overall biomedical research structure and maintained incremental growth across core institutes and major priority areas. As a result, NIH enters the second half of FY 2026 with funding stability rather than disruption, but this is alongside emerging shifts in funding practices that place less exclusive emphasis on paylines and greater weight on discretionary and programmatic considerations.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) saw a similar pattern, but with flatter results. The President’s FY 2026 budget request proposed about $3.9 billion for the agency. However, congressional appropriators ultimately kept NSF funding close to its FY 2025 level, roughly $9 billion overall, largely avoiding a worst-case scenario. Although the February appropriations decisions effectively protected the agency’s core research accounts from major contraction, they did not produce substantial growth that many in the research community had hoped for.
USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA-NIFA) followed a similar path. Large cuts proposed by the President for FY 2026 were avoided, and the final appropriations held funding near the prior year. NIFA’s total budget landed at roughly $1.7 billion, very similar to FY 2025, with the Agriculture and Food Research Institute (AFRI) remaining around the mid-$400 million range and formula funding streams largely preserved.
For FY 2026, the President proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and deeply cutting the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) and Department of Energy (DOE), but Congress ultimately maintained all four agencies at near-level funding.
The rejection of the President’s steep cuts by Congress is a reason for optimism for the research and education community. By maintaining near-level funding across NIH, NSF, NIFA, NEH, NEA, IES, DOE, and other key agencies, lawmakers have provided stability that largely allow programs to continue without disruption and gives researchers, educators, and grantees confidence to plan for the year ahead. Although growth was limited, avoiding drastic reductions is a significant step toward sustaining the nation’s scientific, agricultural, and cultural priorities and helping maintain U.S. leadership and competitiveness in research and innovation.