Seattle NIH money was under attack. Now it’s at a record high

Nine months ago, Sen. Patty Murray held a media event at Seattle Children’s Hospital to highlight the dire state of the National Institutes of Health.

Thousands of NIH employees had been fired. The Trump administration was trying to cut billions in “indirect costs” that fund things like lab equipment and janitors. Hundreds of grants had been canceled; thousands more were in limbo. And President Donald Trump was pushing a 40% cut to the budget of the world’s premier funder of medical research, saying NIH was “too big” and had “broken the trust of the American people.”

On Friday, Murray returned to Seattle Children’s to crow.

Most of the grants that had been frozen or terminated seem to have been reinstated. The push to cut researchers’ “indirect costs” has been blocked by courts. And last week, Trump signed a spending package that not only does not cut NIH but also funds it with nearly $49 billion, more than ever before.

“Instead of cutting cancer and Alzheimer’s research by nearly half, like he wanted to do, I won more than a $415 million increase,” Murray said Friday. “And every penny of that is going to make a difference.”

Seattle is a hub of medical research, with institutions like Seattle Children’s, Fred Hutch and the University of Washington receiving more than $1 billion annually from NIH.

Seattle Children’s received $105 million from NIH in 2025, said Vittorio Gallo, the chief scientific officer at Seattle Children’s, which was about 70% of the hospital’s total research funding.

“This research is already improving how we diagnose disease, personalized treatment and improve outcomes for children across our region,” Gallo said.

Fred Hutch also gets about 70% of its research funding from NIH, about $400 million last year, said Dr. Rachel Issaka, a gastroenterologist at Fred Hutch and a UW professor who researches how to increase colorectal cancer screenings to catch the disease earlier.

“NIH funding leads to scientific discovery, medical innovation and treatments, which is really imperative for lifesaving progress,” she said.

There is no publicly available government catalog of all the grants canceled or delayed last year by the Trump administration as it sought, through its Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, to reshape the federal government and slash spending.

A database compiled by a Harvard data scientist and others lists more than 5,400 NIH grants that were, at one point, either canceled or frozen. Of those, over 4,200 have since been reinstated, according to the database, after rounds of litigation across the country.

The database lists 49 NIH grants in Washington that were disrupted – studying things like opioid abuse, sexual assault recovery, HIV and Alzheimer’s – of which 34 have since been reinstated.

“We still live in a state of uncertainty,” Gallo said. “We’re still experiencing a lot of delays in funding. These are delays in clinical research, in clinical trials, so every delay has a direct impact on patient care.”

Despite congressional Republicans’ seemingly lockstep support of Trump’s agenda, many were not on board with Trump’s push for deep cuts to medical research.

“I think we were all stunned when we saw that the president’s budget came out with a 40% cut to the NIH, and then when asked about it, the president says ‘I’m all for biomedical research,’ ” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., and the chair of the subcommittee overseeing NIH funding, said last week. “I’m like, ‘Well, there’s a disconnect between what you’re sending to us and what you’re telling the American people.’ ”

Murray, the top Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said she worked with Capito and other Republicans to preserve NIH funding.

“I talked to so many of them that when we actually got in the room for final negotiations, everybody knew I was not walking out unless we had this funding,” Murray said. “So it did not become the priority of what we negotiated over.”

NIH funding passed as part of a broad government spending bill. The package garnered more Democratic support than it perhaps would have after Democrats were able to sever funding for the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE, from the broader package.

For Camden Riley, NIH funding has been vital to the last two years of his young life.

A second -grader from Tacoma, Camden likes science and art and wants to be a doctor when he grows up. In 2024, Camden was diagnosed with a rare germ cell tumor in his brain. That type of tumor represents just 2% or 3% of central nervous system tumors in children.

Because of the location of the tumor, a biopsy to determine if it was benign or malignant was extremely risky, his mother, Brianne Riley, said Friday.

Doctors at Seattle Children’s were able to use DNA testing of his cerebral spinal fluid – instead of a surgical biopsy – to identify the tumor and determine the course of treatment.

That testing came from NIH-funded research.

Camden was then enrolled in several NIH-funded nationwide pediatric cancer studies.

Camden went through chemotherapy and then 20 rounds of proton radiation. Proton radiation is a specialized and precise type of radiation that carries fewer side effects and long-term risks than traditional radiation. It was developed with NIH funding.

“It undoubtedly improved his long-term wellness,” Brianne said. “Without NIH funding, our journey would have been much more difficult, and its outcome much less promising.”

Camden is currently cancer-free and pretty pumped about an upcoming Make-A-Wish trip to New York to see the Statue of Liberty.