NIH director say cuts aim to reduce ‘ideological research,’ focus on health
“I’m not a politician,” the new director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya insists. “I’m not going to get involved in the political fight over things.”
But the great challenge facing the former Stanford University doctor and economist as he guides the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research is the fear for many that science and American politics have become intertwined as perhaps never before.
In June, NIH staffers issued the Bethesda Declaration, now signed by 484 employees, some named, others anonymous. The declaration said that on Bhattacharya’s watch, the Trump administration has forced the NIH “to politicize research by halting high-quality, peer reviewed grants and contracts.”The declaration also accused the administration of “censoring critical research” on subjects including health disparities, health effects of climate change and gender identity.
Those changes began even before Bhattacharya’s first day at the agency, April 1. In the first months of the new administration, Trump’s executive orders on gender, vaccine mandates, and diversity, equity and inclusion took shape in the thousands of NIH grants that were canceled or had their funding frozen.
As Bhattacharya sees it, however, the cuts that aligned the NIH with the president’s agenda were actually about distancing the agency from politics.
“Making America healthy again,” he said in a recent one-hour interview with The Washington Post, “involves deprioritizing research that doesn’t have a chance of making America healthy, [such as] a lot of ideological research that I think served to create a perception that the NIH is a political organization rather than the scientific organization it actually is.”
Founded in 1887 as a one-room laboratory on Staten Island, the NIH today acts as the nation’s primary agency for biomedical and public health research. It supports studies at institutions across the globe and conducts others in the laboratories on its more than 300-acre campus.
At the end of 2024, the NIH boasted 27 institutes and centers, including a Clinical Center where a staff of 1,200 doctors, dentists and PhD researchers and more than 600 nurses cared for patients and conducted clinical trials. The NIH budget stood at $48 billion, its workforce about 21,000 employees.
The workforce number is already out of date. The Trump administration began its reshaping of the agency by firing about 1,200 employees before Bhattacharya arrived; another 1,300 were fired on the new director’s first day.
In the interview, Bhattacharya laid out a vision for the agency that would have it emerge from the months of turmoil with a sharper focus on the chronic diseases that have lowered the nation’s life expectancy, includingcancer, heart disease and diabetes.
That goal appears to have been undercut by some grant terminations and funding freezes.At the National Cancer Institute alone, awards that have either been terminated or subject to funding freezes supportedat least 40 registered clinical trials. The trials were all either actively enrolling patients or had not yet had the chance to start enrollment, according to Trials Tracker, a nonprofit website maintained by Amy Knopf, an associate professor at Indiana University and Rob Wagner, an independent software engineer.
Bhattacharya, a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration that opposed school and work closures during the pandemic, was only a few months into the NIH job when he found himself on the receiving end of the Bethesda declaration critical of the agency’s new direction.
Bhattacharya said that despite coming to the NIH as a prominent critic, he has so far found “many allies who share my desires, my vision.” That vision includes other key goals: solving the long-running problem of scientists claiming important findings that other research teams cannot validate and fostering an atmosphere that encourages scientists to think big and voice dissenting opinions.
One ally, Jeffery Taubenberger, the acting director for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which is part of the NIH,singled out Bhattacharya’s“bold, aspirational vision to end the HIV epidemic.” He also applauded the director’s support of efforts to develop next-generation vaccines, including a universal influenza vaccine, a $500 million effort based on work by Taubenberger and Matthew Memoli, Bhattacharya’s principal deputy.
Bhattacharya promised that NIH scientists and staff won’t lose their jobs for disagreeing with his views, or those of Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“Absolutely,” he said. “I mean, the scientific enterprise requires dissent.”
While Bhattacharya has repeatedly called the NIH “the crown jewel of biomedical research institutions in the world,” he agreed with the Trump administration’s assessment, in its 2026 budget proposal, that the agency 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.”
The example of “broken trust” he returns to again and again is the coronavirus pandemic. The opposing narratives of the pandemic have become as much a matter of politics as of science, as illustrated by the White House’s new covid page. The page, titled “Lab Leak,” is written as though the lingering questions about the virus’s origins have been answered. Bhattacharya appears to largely agree.
“I haven’t reviewed all of the page, but most of it I’ve looked at seems pretty accurate,” he said.
The conclusion that a lab leak triggered the pandemic has been disputed by many scientists but waslabeled “a possibility” that cannot be ruled out in a June report from a committee convened by the World Health Organization.
“Do we have a smoking gun?” Bhattacharya said. “Well, we don’t have the Wuhan laboratory lab notebooks. They haven’t cooperated. What we do have is a tremendous amount of molecular biological evidence and then evidence from investigations.”
In a report commissioned by President Joe Biden’s administration and declassified five days after Trump’s inauguration, the Central Intelligence Agency changed its position to say that a lab leak was the most likely cause of the pandemic, though it expressed “low confidence” in that conclusion.
As of Monday, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’s website included this statement: “The scientific evidence thus far suggests that SARS-CoV-2 likely resulted from viral evolution in nature and jumped to people or through some unidentified animal host.”
Bhattacharya praised Operation Warp Speed, the first Trump administration’s program to develop vaccines against the coronavirus in record time, as “a great success.” Yet the vaccine mandates that put those shots into millions of American arms were, in his view, “a tremendous public policy mistake” that eroded trust in vaccines.
He faulted public health officials for the message they sent, which he characterized as: “You have to get the vaccine. You’re protecting your family members, you’re protecting yourself, and you will never get covid was the implication.”
For the most part, public health officials stressed that taking the vaccine would protect people from severe disease, though there were a few occasions when some said it would prevent people from getting sick or spreading the disease.
Bhattacharya said that in promoting the vaccines, Biden administration health officials went beyond what they knew.
In the midst of the nation’s worst measles outbreak in 33 years, Bhattacharya expressed strong support for the MMR vaccine, calling it “the primary way that we address and should address measles.” Kennedy, his boss at HHS, has been a longtime critic of vaccines, including the MMR vaccine, though he recently called MMR “the most effective way to prevent the spread of measles.”
Although he told senators at his confirmation hearing that he does not believe there is a link between autism and vaccines, Bhattacharya was unwilling to rule out revisiting the widely debunked theory in the NIH’s investigation into the rise of autism cases in the United States.
“I’m not going to put my thumb on the scale and say you’re not allowed to look at this or that cause,” he said.
Other scientific questions, however, have been entirely or largely removed from consideration.
The director pledged in the interview to ensure “that every single American, no matter what their race, sex or sexual preference, will find their health needs represented in the portfolio of NIH.” Yetabout 90 studies on transgender health have been canceled or had their funding frozen, according to Grant Witness.
“I think the idea that you need to have sort of gender-change operations, hormone blocking for children in order to prevent suicides is tremendously weak and likely nonexistent,” Bhattacharya said. He added that by cutting the study of gender-change surgery and hormone blockers, “HHS is doing children, especially children who wonder about their gender, a service.”
Michelle R. Kaufman, an associate professor in the department of health, behavior and society at Johns Hopkins University, disagreed, saying survey research “shows that nearly half of adolescents who identify as nonbinary or transgender have had serious thoughts of suicide, and nearly a third have attempted to take their own lives,” risks that can be reduced by providing gender-affirming care.
Research from the New England Journal of Medicine and Stanford University also finds that providing gender-affirming care significantly reduces incidence of depression, self-harm and attempts of suicide for this population.
“Eliminating research that further improves gender-affirming care is not protecting children,” Kaufman said, but is “scientifically unjustified and puts these adolescents at further risk of health issues.”
In the interview, Bhattacharya stressed that he has been limited in his ability to prevent cuts to the NIH budget and must work with what Congress and Trump provide the agency.
“My job,” he said, “is to make sure that whatever budget we end up with, we end up doing excellent science that meets the mission of the NIH.”
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