The National Institutes of Health (NIH) BRAIN Initiative program could sustain another major loss in funding this year, according to a government spending bill passed today by the U.S. House of Representatives.
The bill would avert a federal government shutdown on 14 March and keep it funded for the rest of the current fiscal year, which concludes at the end of September. The plan calls for decreased non-defense spending overall, though it outlines stable funding levels for most of the NIH compared with last year, says Alessandra Zimmermann, budget and policy analyst for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a nonprofit general scientific society based in Washington, D.C. “That means no growing with inflation, but at least there are no cuts.”
Funding for the BRAIN Initiative, on the other hand, would drop by 20 percent, according to the bill. It specifies $91 million for the program, which is allocated from the 21st Century Cures Act, and would hold base funding from NIH institutes and centers at 2024 levels.
As a result, the program would lose $81 million compared with fiscal year 2024, when the program received $402 million—$172 million from the Cures Act and an additional $230 million in base funding. Last year’s funding already represented a nearly 40 percent decrease from the previous year, as a result of a planned ramping down of Cures Act funding and no increase in base funding.
During the current fiscal year’s budget negotiations, the Senate requested additional funding to return BRAIN Initiative funding to 2023 levels. That additional funding was not included in the House spending bill.
“This is a massive loss for neuroscience,” says Cory Miller, professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego. Without an increase in funding, the BRAIN Initiative will see a cumulative loss of roughly $1 billion by 2026—money that could have been put toward understanding and treating neurological disorders, he says. “You’re not going to ‘make America healthy again’ without doing research. Losing a billion dollars for that is catastrophic, not just for scientists, but for the entire society.”
“BRAIN made all this amazing progress,” including identifying how to target specific circuits and cell types, Miller says. The next step for the program—a critical one—is figuring out how those building blocks function within the human brain, he adds. “That’s what’s really been shelved.”
If the bill goes on to pass the Senate vote later this week, it will then go to President Trump. If Congress cannot reach an agreement by midnight on Friday, a government shutdown is set to go into effect.
During a shutdown, federal employees, including researchers, are required to either stop working or work without pay and then receive pay retroactively, Zimmermann says. And many services, including large experimental infrastructure, go offline, she adds. “It’s not good for research.”
