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.
