NIMH's budget was $2.19 billion for the third year running; Congress rejected merging it into a new institute

Significant findings

The Congressional Research Service's report on NIH funding, updated May 18, 2026, gives the enacted NIH program level, excluding ARPA-H, as $47.311 billion in FY2024, $47.035 billion in FY2025 and $47.493 billion in FY2026. Its per-institute table gives the National Institute of Mental Health $2,191.7 million in FY2024, $2,191.7 million in FY2025 and $2,189.8 million in FY2026, a change of minus $1.8 million or minus 0.1 percent.

The President's FY2026 request had proposed a "National Institute of Behavioral Health (NIBH)" formed by consolidating three existing institutes, within a wider plan in which "Four ICs would have been eliminated, while 19 would have been consolidated into eight restructured ICs." The report records the outcome: "The FY2026 appropriations maintained the preexisting structure of NIH and did not adopt the proposed restructuring from the President's budget."

For scale, NIMH's own FY2025 congressional justification describes the institute as "the lead federal agency for research on mental illnesses, with a mission to transform the understanding and treatment of mental illnesses through basic and clinical research", reports that in FY2023 it funded 2,430 research project grants worth $1,599.1 million, and had requested $2,548.7 million for FY2025, "an increase of $207.0 million or 8.8 percent compared to the FY 2023 Final". It received $2,191.7 million.

Worth asking

The federal research budget for mental illness has been flat in nominal dollars for three years, which is a cut in real ones, and in 2026 the institute itself was proposed for consolidation and kept only because Congress declined. Beside it, the drug review center at the FDA, funded mostly by applicants, grew. Where the money for new treatments comes from is part of what a reader is entitled to know when told a treatment is new.