Right now, biomedical research funding at agencies like NIH, CDC, the Department of Defense, and VA is set year-by-year through the regular appropriations process — which means it competes against everything else in the federal budget. This bill would appropriate multi-year funding directly for these four programs starting in FY2027, with NIH growing from $52.5 billion to $102 billion by FY2036 (and indexed to inflation after that), CDC from $9.9 billion to $19.3 billion, the DoD health research program from $2.9 billion to $5.7 billion, and the VA medical and prosthetics research program from $1.07 billion to $1.98 billion. The appropriations would also be exempted from across-the-board budget sequestration cuts and excluded from PAYGO scorecards, meaning the new spending would not trigger automatic offsets.
Average Household Impact
- Federal biomedical research funding — NIH, CDC, DoD, and VA research programs grow to inflation-adjusted statutory baselines through 2036
Transparency & Accountability
- PAYGO scorecard offsets — Budgetary effects excluded from both statutory and Senate PAYGO scorecards
- Sequestration exposure — New appropriations exempted from Balanced Budget and Emergency Deficit Control Act cuts
Congressional Summary
American Cures Act This bill permanently funds several federal agencies and programs that perform biomedical research.The bill provides specified funding forthe National Institutes of Health,the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,the Department of Defense health program, andthe Department of Veterans Affairs medical and prosthetics research program.The bill exempts the funding from sequestration, which is a process of automatic, usually across-the-board spending reductions under which budgetary resources are permanently cancelled to enforce specific budget policy goals.It also exempts the budgetary effects of the funding from the Statutory Pay-As-You-Go (PAYGO) Act of 2010 and the Senate PAYGO rule.
Details
- Congress
- 119th
- Chamber
- Senate
- Status
- summarized
- Action
- Introduced in Senate
- Action Date
- 2026-05-12
- Date Added
- 2026-05-16
- Source
- Congress.gov →
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