Updated at 10:26 am on June 9, 2025
Since the extraction of the nomination of President Donald Trump to serve as director of the National Institutes of Health, Jay Bhattacharya – a health economist and prominent Covid Contrarian had advocated the reopening of society in the early months of the pandemic – promised to abnormal. “Dissent is the essence of science,” said Bhattacharya during his confirmation hearing in March. “I will promote a culture in which nih leadership will actively encourage different perspectives and create an environment in which scientists, including scientists and scientists in the early career who disagree with me, can express respectfully.”
Two months after his term of office at the office, hundreds of NIH officials take Bhattacharya at his word.
More than 300 civil servants, from all 27 institutions and centers of the NIH, have signed and sent a letter to Bhattacharya who condemns the changes that the agency has thrown into chaos in recent months – and calls on their director to turn some of the most harmful shifts. Since January, the agency has been forced by Trump officials to dismiss thousands of employees and to relax or withhold it from Thousands of research projects. Tomorrow, Bhattacharya will appear for a Senate Credits subcommittee to discuss a proposed sloping stripe of $ 18 billion for the NIH budget – about 40 percent of the current allocation of the agency.
The letter, entitled the Bethesda statement (A reference to the location of the NIH in Bethesda, Maryland), was modeled on the Great Barrington Declaration, an open letter published by Bhattacharya and two of his colleagues in October 2020 who ‘the prevailing COVID-19 policy’ criticized for most people to life. The approach that the Great Barrington statement had explained at the time was large on a large scale by the experts in public health, including the World Health Organization and Follow-up-NIH director Francis Collins, as dangerous and scientifically unhealthy. The allusion in the NIH letter, officials told me, not the intention: “We hoped that he could see himself in us while we brought that worries,” said Jenna Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Nier Diases, and one of the organizers of the letter, told me.
None of the NIH officials with whom I spoke for this story could remember another time in the history of their agency when the staff has been publicly expressed against a director. But none of them could also remember that the nih was once so aggressively chased away from his core mission. “It was time enough for us to pronounce,” said Sarah Kobrin, a branch chef at the National Cancer Institute, who signed its name to the letter. To maintain American research, government scientists – usually aimed at investigating and financing the projects that most likely promote the health of the public – are now instead trying to persuade the director of their agency to help them win a political fight with the White House.
In an e -mail statement, Bhattacharya said: “The statement of Bethesda has some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions that the NIH has taken in recent months, including the continuous support of the NIH for international cooperation. Nevertheless, the respectful different opinion in science is productive. We all want the NIH.” A spokesperson for HHS also defended the policy that criticized the letter with the argument that the NIH “works to remove ideological influence from the scientific process” and “improve the transparency, strictness and reproducibility of research funded by NIH.”
The desk spends most of his Almost $ 48 billion budget Powering Science: It is the world’s single public financier of biomedical research. But since January the NIH has canceled Thousands of subsidies-Yerlessly awarded on the basis of merit to political reasons: supporting dei programming, have ties with universities accused of its administration of anti-Semitism, sending resources to research initiatives in other countries, promoting scientific areas that Trump officials have considered wasting.
Before 2025, cancellations of subsidy were virtually unheard of. But an officer at the agency, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of professional consequences, told me that staff there is now spending almost as much time on terminating subsidies as a grant. And the few prominent projects that the agency has since been instructed to finance, seem to be either aimed at confirming the prejudices of the administration about specific health problems, or to benefit NIH leaders. “We just become a weapon,” said another official, who signed their name anonymously for the letter. “They use subsidies as a lever to punish institutions and the academic world and to censor and suppress science.”
NIH officials have tried to express their concerns in other ways. During internal meetings, leaders of the institutions and centers of the Agency have questioned the major policy shifts for subsidies. Some prominent officials have resigned. Current and former NIH employees have held weekly watches in Bethesda, to commemorate, with the words of the organizers, ‘The lives and knowledge lost due to nih cuts. (Participants are encouraged to wear black.)
But these efforts have made little to delay the flood of changes at the desk. Ian Morgan, a postdoctoral fellow at the NIH and one of the signatories of the letter, told me that the Nih Fellows Union, of which he is part, Bhattacharya has repeated requests to discuss the nih since his first week. “All they have been ignored,” said Morgan. By formalizing their objections and signing their names to them, officials told me, they hope that Bhattacharya will finally feel compelled to respond. (To add to the public pressure, Jeremy Berg, who led the NIH National Institute of General Medical Sciences until 2011, also organizes a public support letter for the Bethesda statement, in collaboration with Stand Up For Science, which organized meetings to support research.)
Scientists elsewhere at HHS, who supervise the NIH, have also become unusually public in the deficiency of political leadership. Last month, after health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.-in a bizarre departure of Precedent-announcement on social media that he bypassed his own agency, the CDC, and the COVID shots of the schedule for youth immunization, CDC officials chose to retain the vaccines in their recommendationsunder the condition of shared decision -making with a healthcare provider.
Many signatories of the Bethesda letter are hopeful that Bhattacharya, “as a scientist, has some of the same values as we,” said Benjamin Feldman, a staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Me. Perhaps, with his academic references and dedication to evidence, he will be willing to help with the pushback against the general attacks of administration on science and the ability of the agency to process research.
But other officials with whom I spoke were not that optimistic. Many in the nih now feel that they work in a ‘fear culture’, Norton said. Since January, NIH officials have told me that they have been shouted and bullied by HHS staff that insists on policy changes; Some of the NIH leaders who are most pronounced against leadership are also violently assigned to irrelevant positions. At one point Norton, after fighting for a program focused on researchers diversity, some members of Nih Leadership came to her office and warned her that they did not want to see her on the next list of mass force. (In conversations with me, all the civil servants mentioned emphasized with whom I spoke, that they spoke in their personal capacity, and not for the nih.)
Bhattacharya, who took over it Only two months agoIs not the Trump appointed that most decisions that influence the NIH, and therefore it may not have the power to reverse or ignore them. HHS officials have put pressure on the leadership of the office to defy court securities, as I reported; Massive tiles of subsidies are under the supervision of Doge. And as much as Bhattacharya perhaps deviating different opinions, he does not seem through it so far.
At the beginning of May, Mailed Berg Bhattacharya to express an alarm about the serious delay of the NIH in making subsidies and to remind him of his responsibilities as director to restore the funds in a responsible manner that the congress had assigned to the agency. The next morning, according to the fair that Berg shared with me, Bhattacharya replied and said that “in contrast to the statement you make in the letter”, it was his task to ensure that the money from the NIH would be spent on projects that promote American health, instead of “on ideological boondoggles and dangerous research.” And in a recent town hall in NIH, Bhattacharya rejected The concern of one employee that the Trump administration purified the identifying variable of gender from scientific research. (Years of evidence support its use.) Instead, he repeated the Trump conversation that “sex is a very neatly defined variable” and argued that gender should not be included as “a routine question to make an ideological point.”
The officials with whom I spoke had few clear plans for what they had to do if their letter is not despised by leadership. Within the desk, most of them see few levers to pull. In the town hall, Bhattacharya also endorsed the very controversial idea that human research started the pandemic and noticed that nih-financeed science in particular had been blamed. When dozens of staff members stood and left the auditorium In protest, the applause that Bhattacharya interrupted, he just smiled. “It’s nice to have free speech,” he said, before he went on right away.
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