The first year of Make America Healthy Again did not build the health revolution it sold and it did not deliver the cuts it proposed either. It left money on the table, unused, accruing debt.
They just can't make anything work, even with supposed captains of industry and conservative academia advising.
The MAHA Commission's September strategy proposed a new agency, the Administration for a Healthy America, to absorb five HHS divisions and reorient the department around chronic disease. To pay for it, the administration's FY2026 budget request proposed cutting NIH from $47.0 billion to $27.9 billion, a 40.6 percent reduction, and CDC from $9.0 billion to $4.3 billion, a 52 percent reduction, eliminating its chronic-disease-prevention center outright.
Even though the budget stayed flat, 694 research grants were cut. Somewhere around $2 billion were taken away from studies actively in the course of research, now wasted. Infectious disease research took the largest single hit, $506 million. Minority health and disparities research absorbed the deepest cut by percentage of any institute, nearly 30 percent of its entire portfolio. These cancellations disrupted roughly one in thirty NIH clinical trials in progress, affecting more than 74,000 participants.
Here is the part that isn't a matter of opinion. Federal law gives the executive branch exactly three options for appropriated money it doesn't want to spend: spend it, ask Congress to formally rescind it, or request a narrow, time-limited deferral. It does not have the option of just declining to spend it. On August 5, 2025, GAO ruled that NIH did precisely that, violating the Impoundment Control Act by withholding already-appropriated funds and freezing new awards without ever sending Congress a rescission request. NIH obligated nearly $8 billion less between February and June 2025 than the same months a year earlier.
The money hasn't gone to the cancelled programs, and it hasn't gone to any new MAHA initiative, none of those exist as funded line items either. It is simply idle, on a countdown toward vanishing having funded nothing.
For scale: the federal government paid $1.028 trillion in net interest on the debt in fiscal 2025, more than twenty times the health research funding frozen in just the first two months of these cancellations. A movement that campaigned on redirecting the federal health budget ended its first cycle having redirected almost nothing, cut less than promised, built nothing it proposed, and left a real, GAO-confirmed sum of money doing exactly nothing.