While the Trump administration stood on the country's medical research financing system in recent months, scientists and administrators of the National Institutes of Health often wondered privately how much autonomy the director of the agency, dr. Jay Bhattacharya, had.
After all, the Department of Efficiency of the Government, the project to reduce the costs of the signature of Elon Musk, helped to guide the decisions to cancel or delay research grants. Other projects were victims of the front of President Trump with universities for anti -Semitism. But given the opportunity in front of a panel of the Senate on Tuesday to dissipate the suspicions about the influence of Nih, dr. Bhattacharya has done very little to claim the property of the perhaps more rocky period in the many decades of research institutes of the agency funding.
The decisions of freezing the payments of subsidy to the Northwestern University “took place before entering in office,” said dr. Bhattacharya al panel, members of the Senate's allocation committee.
He repeatedly stated that a proposal to reduce the budget of $ 18 billion – almost 40 percent – was “a collaboration between the congress and the administration” and refused to speak in detail of how the cuts would influence the agency.
And he insisted on the attempt to reduce funding to universities for the general research-anal expenditure of the cost reduction movement that is cooked in the 2026 budget proposal of the administration-the Dr. Bhattacharya said: “I don't want to enter this”, citing in progress.
Several democrats of the Committee said they were confused on who was pulling the agency's ropes.
“I want to know, who is holding this loan?” He asked Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, a democrat, citing evidence that the Nih had distributed billions of dollars in less than subsidies so far this year compared to the same period last year. “Are you? Is it doge? Is it Obra?” He added, referring to the management and budget office. “Who is making those decisions?”
Dr. Bhattacharya replied: “There are a series of decisions, I believe, which led to some of those pauses of subsidies”. For example, he said that he had been his call to move away from what he called “politicized science”, a term that he used in the past to describe the research relating to diversity and equity problems. But he said that the restrictions on Harvard research funding and other main institutions had been “joined with the administration”.
Senator Dick Durbin of the Illinois, another democratic, reacted abruptly after Dr. Bhattacharya denied responsibility for payments to search for freezing of the administration in Northwestern.
An e-mail from a Nih official in mid-April, weeks after confirmation of Dr. Bhattacharya, ordered employees not to issue prizes for Northwestern and many other universities and not to tell institutions because their funding had been frozen.
“The dollar stops in your office,” Durbin said to Dr. Bhattacharya. “Don't blame another person.”
The effort of the Trump administration to significantly reduce the agency's expenses next year have aroused criticism from the senators of both parties, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, Republican.
The proposed reduction “is so disturbing,” said Dr. Bhattacharya to Dr.. “It would be late or would stop effective treatments and treatments to be developed for diseases such as Alzheimer's, cancer, type 1.” diabetes ” The plans, he said, put the United States at risk of “falling behind China”.
Dr. Bhattacharya said that Nih was engaged in research on Alzheimer's and other diseases and that he would have worked with legislators to satisfy “the health needs of all Americans”.
The director opened the doors to an agreement between the Trump administration and the main universities that would pay their funding for medical research, although it did not offer details on the prospects for this agreement or what would have liked to get to one. “I am very confident that a resolution can be made with universities in which these grants were paused,” he said.
In recent months, Nih has abruptly closed more than 1,300 subsidy prizes and has delayed funding for over 1,000 other projects. On Monday, dozens of Nih employees signed their names to a letter in which these actions were said to have been taken on the basis of ideological preferences and without scientific inputs of personnel, effectively censoring research on issues such as health disparities, Covid, the health effects of climate change and sexual health.
Dr. Bhattacharya said Tuesday that he had created a process for scientists to appeal to financing cuts. The agency, he said, would have checked the appeals within weeks.