August 2025

On July 31, the Senate Appropriations Committee advanced the FY 2026 Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education (LHHS) appropriations bill on a 26–3 vote.

In contrast to the drastic cuts included in the FY 2026 president’s budget request (PBR) for the Institute of Education Science (IES) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Senate bill preserves IES funding at FY 2024 levels and provides a small increase to NIH above FY 2025. In addition, the Senate LHHS bill maintains the current structure of NIH, whereas the president’s budget request would consolidate many of NIH’s institutes and centers and eliminate some institutes. (See June 2025 AERA Highlights story for more details on the president’s budget request.)

Details for IES and NIH follow.

Institute of Education Sciences

The Senate LHHS bill includes a top line of $793.1 million for IES, at the same level as FY 2024 and the FY 2025 full-year continuing resolution (CR).

In addition to the top line, the bill text includes this language: “which shall be for the purposes and in the amounts specified in the ‘Committee Recommendation’ column for Institute of Education Sciences in the ‘Amounts Recommended in the Bill for Fiscal Year 2026’ table in the report accompanying this Act.”

The full-year continuing resolution for FY 2025 did not carry over the amounts that are typically for the line items within IES from the explanatory statement. This text would ensure that funding for the specific line items within IES would be accounted for in a future spending bill, with all budget items held at the same level as provided in FY 2024. Due to the lack of similar language in the FY 2025 full-year CR, the Department of Education has since interpreted FY 2025 funding for IES as “unallocated,” with the exception of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). Likewise, the FY 2026 budget request categorized funding not proposed for NAEP as “unallocated,” rather than distributed across the various line items.

The chart below notes the specific line items, all flat compared with FY 2024.

In addition to the amounts, the committee report includes several provisions directed to IES activities:

• Statement that “it is the Committee’s expectation that IES will meet those statutory duties and obligations this year and have plans in place to continue doing so in the future”
• Rescission of $25 million of FY 2025 funding allocated for Program Administration
• Support for the Accelerate, Transform, Scale initiative
• Allocation of $1.5 million in the Research, Development, and Dissemination (RD&D) line item for a study on literacy to be conducted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine
• Language that seeks a return to a prior frequency of data collection of the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study
• Briefing by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) to the committee regarding how it will address the removal of confidentiality assurances under the Confidential Information Protection and Statistical Efficiency Act from its data collections (multiple organizations, including AERA, highlighted this issue in response to this declaration for NAEP 2026)
• Support for the School Pulse Panel
• A $10 million set-aside for R&D for NAEP—the budget request proposed eliminating this funding

In addition to specific report language on IES activities, the committee report also directs the Department of Education to “respond to all properly filed requests for education research data access—restricted or otherwise—within a reasonable timeline.”

National Institutes of Health

The FY 2026 Senate LHHS bill includes $48.7 billion in overall program-level funding for NIH, which also accounts for $1.5 billion for the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). Along with the rejection of the cuts that were proposed in the president’s budget request, the report language pushes back on the proposed consolidation of NIH in the budget request and the dismantling of NIH advisory councils. The report language also “notes the importance of maintaining staff with the technical expertise to support the agency’s mission to seek fundamental knowledge about the nature and behavior of living systems and apply that knowledge to enhance health, lengthen life, and reduce illness and disability.”

The report language also comments on indirect costs, in response to efforts by the administration to place a cap of 15 percent on facilities and administrative (F&A) costs. Acknowledging the work of the Joint Associations Group on Indirect Costs to develop an alternate method for determining costs, the report language states that “in anticipation of that effort [the Committee] maintains its longstanding bill language prohibiting NIH from developing or implementing a modified approach to funding F&A costs.”

The bill also includes a small increase of $20 million for the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), with a total of $1.78 billion for the agency. The report language notes that the committee commends and encourages NICHD to continue maintaining longitudinal studies such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Child Development Supplement, Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, and National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.

Although the Senate LHHS bill serves as a repudiation of the actions and proposed cuts by the administration, the House will also weigh in with its version. The House Appropriations Committee schedule has not been announced as of press, but the LHHS legislation is one of the bills that remain for consideration, along with the Commerce, Justice, and Science bill.

Meanwhile, with the deadline for advancing FY 2026 appropriations fast approaching on September 30, the likelihood of a CR also remains in place.