Trump Administration Plans to Slash Significant Portions of HHS Funding

New reporting from the Washington Post says that “the Trump administration is seeking to deeply slash budgets for federal health programs, a roughly one-third cut in discretionary spending by the Department of Health and Human Services.” Healthcare Innovation has the news.

President Trump’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) will propose “paring the 2024 HHS discretionary budget of $121 billion to just $80 billion.” The proposal would specifically reduce the National Institutes of Health’s budget by roughly 40 percent, consolidating its “27 institutes and centers into just eight.” The document also envisions “a new $20 billion agency…called the ‘Administration for a Healthy America,’” which would absorb some of the present agencies’ focuses.

The CDC’s budget would also be cut by about 44 percent as part of this proposal, and “all of the agency’s chronic disease programs and domestic HIV work” would be eliminated. Rural programs stand to be particularly hard-hit by the proposed cuts. Reporting from CNN also said that “institutes researching childhood illnesses, mental health, chronic disease, disabilities, and substance abuse would be shuffled into five new entities” under the proposal.

The budget proposal also assumes that “the administration’s earlier attempt to cap indirect payments to universities at 15 percent, blocked by a court, would be in effect.”

The article referenced in this story originally ran as “BREAKING NOW: Report: Trump White House to Drastically Slash HHS Budget” on Healthcare Innovation, an Endeavor Business Media partner site.