Mapping U.S. federal funding for mental health difficulties from 2020 to 2024 to the hierarchical taxonomy of psychopathology: A registered report.

Psychopathology is a major public health concern, which is why the U.S. government invests billions of dollars annually to investigate its etiology, assessment, course, and treatment. To date, however, there is no empirical mechanism for evaluating how federal research funding is allocated across dimensions of psychopathology. This registered report used the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology as a framework to classify funded research grants from 2020 through 2024 across four psychopathology-focused institutes within the National Institutes of Health according to higher order dimensions of psychopathology. We first present a pilot study supporting the feasibility of using a large language model for this task. In the main study, we quantified the allocation of federal funding across Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology spectra, examining differences across funding agencies, grant mechanisms, and time. Results indicated that the Disinhibited Externalizing spectrum received more funding in this time period than all other spectra combined, and this funding was almost entirely driven by substance-use-related research funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. Internalizing, Autism, Thought Disorder, and Detachment spectra received substantial allocations of federal funding, all of which were predominantly administered by the National Institute on Mental Health. Finally, Antagonistic Externalizing and Somatoform spectra received comparatively little federal funding. Exploratory analyses characterizing funding allocations according to lower-order constructs (i.e., symptoms, traits, disorders) are provided, too. This work provides the first systematic characterization of U.S. research priorities grounded in a contemporary, dimensional model of psychopathology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).