14 Republican senators urge White House to release delayed NIH funds

Source: Politico

07/25/2025 11:28 AM EDT


Republican Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama is sounding the alarm about “the slow disbursement rate” of National Institutes of Health funding included in the March spending bill signed by President Donald Trump.

Britt, who serves as chair of the Senate Appropriations homeland subcommittee, led a letter Friday with thirteen of her GOP colleagues to White House Budget Chief Russ Vought, urging the Office of Management and Budget to “fully implement” the stopgap government funding package enacted earlier this year.

“Suspension of these appropriated funds — whether formally withheld or functionally delayed — could threaten Americans’ ability to access better treatments and limit our nation’s leadership in biomedical science,” Britt and her colleagues warned. “It also risks inadvertently severing ongoing NIH-funded research prior to actionable results.”

It’s the latest example of Republican pushback against the Trump administration’s pattern of withholding money for any variety of programs that lawmakers have previously approved for a specific purpose. The Republican senators stressed in their letter they shared Vought’s “commitment to ensuring NIH funds are used responsibly and not diverted to ideological or unaccountable programs.”

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/25/britt-leads-letter-urging-trump-administration-to-release-delayed-nih-funds-00476872