During a Senate hearing, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jayanta Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., said the last few months have been “bumpy,” while underscoring Congress’ role in approving a budget and taking full responsibility for the agency’s move away from “politicized science.”
“The budget itself is a negotiation between the administration and Congress,” the NIH director said during a June 10 Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies hearing designed to review President Donald Trump’s proposed NIH budget for the next fiscal year. The proposal would slash funds for the research agency by $17.97 billion.
“Congress allocates the funds,” Bhattacharya added.
Sen. John Neely Kennedy, R-La., agreed, calling the proposal the “president's budget.”
“When's the last time Congress took a president's budget and enacted it?” Kennedy asked, adding a few moments later: “It’s never happened in the history of ever.”
Amid questions from Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., Bhattacharya agreed that restructuring federal agencies should be done in collaboration with Congress, as designed by the U.S. Constitution.
But, in the early days of the Trump administration, that's not how officials implemented the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) restructuring. In fact, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, that the initial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) terminations and suspensions “were at least substantially informed by a Control-F keyword search enterprise,” Schatz recalled at the Tuesday hearing.
“Can we agree that we shouldn’t do it that way again?” Schatz asked, following it up with, “I know you have to survive in this administration, but can we agree that this is not the most helpful way to do things?”
“I think a lot of those decisions were made before I got in,” Bhattacharya responded.
When asked how long reinstating workers would take, the NIH director said the agency has set up an appeals process expected to take several weeks, but he did not offer a specific timeline for when employees might return to work.
Meanwhile, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, pressed Bhattacharya for the total number of employees who have left the NIH’s cancer center since Trump took office. She asked for figures including involuntary departures, early retirements and so-called “fork in the road” deals offered by the administration. Murray said she had spoken with Bhattacharya the night before the hearing to prepare him for the question.
Bhattacharya reiterated that 25 members of the National Cancer Institute were laid off but said he had misunderstood Murray’s request and would provide the full number of employee departures by the end of the day.
Abandoned clinical trials
“NIH has now terminated at least 160 clinical trials,” Murray said. “In addition to terminating grants, you are also delaying grant awards and freezing or significantly delaying institutions from being able to draw down their grant funding, which is disrupting clinical trials. How many clinical trials across the country have been impacted by the grants you have terminated, frozen or delayed?"
Bhattacharya said he did not have the specific number of affected trials, but he emphasized that the NIH was working to ensure patients already enrolled in studies would not experience delays in care.
Murray pushed back, citing what she said were multiple examples of patient care being affected. She pointed to the May 30 termination of a 23-year HIV vaccine research effort, stating that scientists, including those at Seattle’s Fred Hutch Cancer Center, were working toward a functional cure. Ending the trial, she said, cut off treatment access for 6,000 patients.
She also referenced the cancellation of other trials, including a Type 2 diabetes study in rural Appalachia and a recurrent ovarian cancer trial testing an immunotherapy paired with monoclonal antibodies.
“I’m asking you this because we have to write an appropriations bill,” the senator explained. “How many fewer clinical trials will you fund in the next fiscal year with an $18 billion cut?”
Bhattacharya said the number would depend on how many trial requests the agency received.
When he later said it would be “hard to say” what researchers would do under a “hypothetical budget,” Murray pressed him again.
“Would you say there’s going to be more clinical trials under an $18 billion, 40% cut?”
“It seems unlikely,” Bhattacharya said.
The ‘politicization’ of science
When asked by Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., who was specifically responsible for the grant terminations and delays at the NIH, Bhattacharya said it varied by grant, citing the university research funding changes as a "joint" decision between the Trump administration and the NIH.
However, on other grants, the NIH director did take full responsibility for moving the agency away "from politicized science.” The Trump administration has described research and medical care for transgender people, members of the LGBTQ community and intersex individuals as examples of “politicized science.” Several researchers studying these topics have had their funding pulled.
At the beginning of the month, the HHS released a review of youth gender dysphoria research bolstering the administration’s stance against gender transition treatments.
“Our duty is to protect our nation’s children—not expose them to unproven and irreversible medical interventions,” Bhattacharya said at the time. “We must follow the gold standard of science, not activist agendas.”
During Tuesday’s hearing, Hawaii's Schatz asked the NIH director about his views on health disparities and varying outcomes among different ethnic groups.
“I would like you to clarify for the public that there may be a category of things that are more ideological and less scientifically based that we can argue about in some other context, but in the scientific context, it is absolutely true that different people respond to different courses of treatment differently, and that should not be swept up as some sort of like woke enterprise,” Schatz said. “Can you just agree with that?”
“Completely agree with that,” Bhattacharya said.
While Bhattacharya said he is moving away from “politicized science,” Wisconsin’s Baldwin argued that the current administration is actually doing the opposite.
“Decisions about which medical research grants should be funded or terminated are, for the first time in history, being made by political appointees, most with absolutely zero scientific training or expertise,” she said.
“I'm very concerned about the sudden proliferation of political appointees at NIH and other actions this administration has taken to politicize scientific research, like allowing DOGE to decide which grants get terminated and which grantees actually get paid,” Baldwin continued. “Injecting politics into NIH will make American science less rigorous, less credible and less competitive. Everything that is happening at NIH is being led by political interests, not by science.”
The agency’s final budget remains under negotiation as lawmakers weigh the implications for public health and research infrastructure plus the impact on countless other organizations funded by the government.