Author: Benjamin Mueller

Senators criticized the head of the National Institutes of Health for not taking responsibility for Trump administration cuts to research funding.As the Trump administration clamped down on the country’s medical research funding apparatus in recent months, scientists and administrators at the National Institutes of Health often privately wondered how much autonomy the agency’s director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, had.After all, the Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk’s signature cost-cutting project, helped drive decisions to cancel or delay research grants. Other projects fell victim to President Trump’s face-off with universities over antisemitism. But given an opportunity before a Senate panel on Tuesday to dispel suspicions about who wields influence at the N.I.H., Dr. Bhattacharya did little to claim ownership of perhaps the rockiest period in the agency’s many decades of funding research institutions.Decisions to freeze grant payments to Northwestern University “happened before I got into office,” Dr. Bhattacharya told the panel, members of the Senate Appropriations Committee.He repeatedly said a proposal to shrink the N.I.H. budget by $18 billion — nearly 40 percent — was “a collaboration between Congress and the administration” and declined to talk in detail about how the cuts would affect the agency.And pressed on an effort to curtail funding to universities for research overhead expenses — a cost-cutting move that is baked into the administration’s 2026 budget proposal — Dr. Bhattacharya said, “I don’t want to get into that,” citing ongoing litigation.Several Democrats on the committee said they were confused about who was pulling the strings at the agency.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.

In a scathing public letter, employees of the National Institutes of Health accused the administration of undermining the agency’s work and endangering people’s health.More than 60 employees of the National Institutes of Health signed their names to a scathing letter sent on Monday to denounce what they described as the degradation of the country’s medical research apparatus under President Trump, accusing the administration of illegally withholding money, endangering participants in studies and censoring critical research.The letter, sent to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the N.I.H. director, and then posted online, was a remarkable rebuke of the agency’s leadership. In interviews, signatories to the letter said that they were concerned they could be fired for speaking out, but that the risks of acquiescing to orders they saw as unethical — and in some cases illegal — were too great.“We dissent to administration policies that undermine the N.I.H. mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe,” they wrote in the four-page letter. “Many have raised these concerns to N.I.H. leadership, yet we remain pressured to implement harmful measures.”The letter included signatories from across the agency’s 27 institutes and centers. Its organizers called it “The Bethesda Declaration,” a reference both to the home of the agency’s headquarters and to a 2020 missive by Dr. Bhattacharya, the Great Barrington Declaration, opposing Covid lockdowns in 2020. In that letter, he and his co-authors argued for dispensing with the lockdowns in the interest of letting the virus spread among younger, healthier people.Dr. Bhattacharya, who was then an economist and professor of medicine at Stanford University, has described feeling bruised by heavy criticism of the idea, including from N.I.H officials. After he was nominated to lead the agency, he promised to “establish a culture of respect for free speech in science and scientific dissent at the N.I.H.”With the letter, some of his employees are putting that promise to the test. “We hope you will welcome this dissent,” they wrote.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe.