Hundreds of employees of the National Institutes of Health – the largest public financier of biomedical research in the world – openly protest against the policy of the Trump government with regard to the agency and say that the revolution and damage to the institution are so great that they had no choice.
One letter Sent on 9 June to Bureau director Jay Bhattacharya, signed by more than 300 current or former employees – including more than a quarter who have publicly signed their names – is an extraordinary reprimand of the actions of the Trump government against the NIH this year. And that is not a small list. They include the termination of hundreds of subsidies financing scientific and biomedical research throughout the country, the firing of more than 1,000 employees, refueling financing for young scientists and the termination of billions in funds to partner research institutions abroad, a relocation that will damage current and former NIH employees that Fighting, among other things.
“It has been soul change,” said a NIH employee who signed the letter, who agreed to KFF Health News with it because they are not authorized to speak with the press and fear of revenge. “This is important for anyone who has ever been sick or knows someone who did that.”
Bhattacharya received the letter – of which he said that “has a number of fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions that the NIH has taken in recent months” – a day before he testified for a subcommittee on the Senate’s budget proposal for the Nih. That proposal aims to reduce the financing of the agency by 40% and to collapse its 27 institutions and centers. And it caused some fireworks with legislators, in particular Democrats, who submitted countless complaints.
“What the Trump government now does with NIH is to be honestly catastrophic,” said Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash.) During the Senate Credit Subcommissie Hearing on 10 June.
Bhattacharya said that the budget is “a collaboration” with the congress, making the proposal clear that the White House proposal is far from stone. But he also took responsibility for specific actions that the administration has taken without conference involvement. Asked by Senator Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) That makes decisions to keep subsidy finance, Bhattacharya said: “I made those decisions” to “leave politized science.”
In a town hall meeting with NIH employees in May, a recording of which KFF Health News obtained, Bhattacharya argued that is determined by nih research aimed at racial and ethnic minorities “is ideological in nature, and that the health and well-being of no one does not promote”-a characterization that nih workers.
“They actually do exactly that they don’t say,” said an employee, “and cutting entire science areas that are crucial to understand how patient care and the results of the patient can be improved.”
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