The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program is among the programs the budget would cut.
President Donald Trump is asking Congress to approve a budget that would eliminate or make cuts to some health programs.
Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2026 budget includes $32 million in cuts to health programs and offices.
The president wants to eliminate more than a dozen programs, including the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, Preschool Development Grants, the Preventive Health and Human Services Block Grant, and the Sexual Risk Avoidance Program.
The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, administered by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which is designed to help poor people afford utilities, “is unnecessary because States have policies preventing utility disconnection for low-income households,” the White House said in its budget request to Congress.
Preschool Development Grants, which provide funds to preschool administrators and are partially administered by HHS, were weaponized by the previous administration to “extend the Federal reach and push DEI policies on to toddlers,” the White House said, referring to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Preventive Health and Human Services Block Grant, which provides funding to states for public health, is better funded by states themselves, the White House said.
It also said that the Sexual Risk Avoidance Program is duplicative of another program administered by HHS.
In addition to the program cuts, Trump is seeking to eliminate some CDC and National Institutes of Health (NIH) offices.
The budget asks for no funding for the National Institute on Minority and Health Disparities, the Fogarty International Center, the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, and the National Institute of Nursing Research, in part because of expenditures for DEI initiatives, according to the White House.
Officials said that the NIH “has broken the trust of the American people with wasteful spending, misleading information, risky research, and the promotion of dangerous ideologies that undermine public health,” including research in China that multiple intelligence agencies have assessed as resulting in the COVID-19 pandemic.
The budget calls for $27 billion for NIH research.
At the CDC, the budget would eliminate four centers, among them the National Center for Chronic Diseases Prevention and Health Promotion. The offices are “duplicative, DEI, or simply unnecessary,” the White House said. The budget maintains more than $4 billion for the CDC.
The NIH and CDC did not respond to requests for comment.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the social media platform X highlighted how the budget also proposes a $500 million investment in Make America Healthy Again initiatives, calling it “a critical step toward ending the childhood chronic disease epidemic.” He did not mention the cuts.
Kennedy previously announced an overhaul to HHS that featured slashing 10,000 jobs and reorganizing divisions to improve efficiency. He and other health officials have said that funding for critical programs would remain intact.
Some lawmakers criticized Trump’s proposed cuts to health programs.
“He is eviscerating funding for school districts that serve low-income students, rental and utility bill assistance, and child care programs, while decimating medical research that cancer and Alzheimer’s patients rely on,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said in a statement.
The Heritage Action for America political group was among those offering support for the budget, writing on Facebook that it “is laser-focused on eliminating the bureaucratic rot in the Federal Government once and for all.”