The Pentagon Signed a Deal Letting It Draw on NIH Money. Congress Found Out by Asking.

The Defense Department has signed an interagency agreement that opens a channel for money appropriated to biomedical research to flow instead to the Pentagon, and lawmakers learned of it only after Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee pressed the National Institutes of Health for documents.

The agreement, which runs until 2036, "facilitates the transfer of funds from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to the Office of the Assistant Secretary of War (OASW)." Its stated purpose is to support advanced development of medical countermeasures against pandemic influenza, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats, and emerging infectious diseases. It names no dollar figure.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, the ranking Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, disclosed the document and called for it to be scrapped. "This secretive attempt to siphon research funds away from NIH is outrageous. The interagency agreement needs to be terminated immediately," DeLauro said. She added that "circumventing Congress to divert money intended to help Americans who are exposed to HIV, influenza, tuberculosis, and other deadly diseases — and directing those funds to the Department of Defense — is beyond the pale."

People familiar with the arrangement, speaking anonymously to Nature and to Science, estimated that as much as $2 billion could move through it, drawn from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. NIAID is the NIH's lead institute for infectious disease and the home of most federally funded HIV, tuberculosis and influenza research in the United States. Two billion dollars is close to a third of its entire budget.

The mechanics matter because appropriations law generally requires agencies to spend money on the purposes Congress named. Interagency agreements are a routine and legal instrument — agencies buy services from one another constantly — but they are not designed to reassign the purpose of an appropriation at this scale, and the committees that write the checks were not told. Federal officials describe the pact as a research collaboration on countermeasures, an area where the Pentagon and NIH have overlapping missions and a long history of joint work.

Critics inside the biomedical community were blunter, characterizing it as a workaround. The dispute lands while the Pentagon is under budgetary strain from the six-month military confrontation with Iran, and while NIH is already operating under a continuing resolution that funds the government only through December 11.

Democrats have asked for the agreement to be terminated and for the department to account for any funds already obligated under it. Congress returns to a compressed calendar: after the government-funding extension passed September 1, lawmakers have most of the fall consumed by campaigns, and the fiscal 2027 spending bills — three passed by the House, none by the Senate — remain unfinished.