A top U.S. health official offered a rare and pointed admission on Tuesday, conceding that the Trump administration’s aggressive rollback of biomedical research funding—totaling billions of dollars—had gone too far, weakening the nation’s scientific infrastructure at a critical time.
Appearing before a Senate panel this week, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya faced pointed questions over the sweeping funding cuts that have rocked the agency—and the even deeper slashes outlined in the administration’s forthcoming budget.
In a measured yet defiant tone, Bhattacharya revealed that he had instituted a formal appeals mechanism for researchers whose work had been abruptly defunded, adding that the NIH had already walked back a significant number of those initial decisions. The message was clear: while the agency is under pressure, it’s not immovable.
“I didn’t take this job to terminate grants,” said the physician and health economist who left a professorship at Stanford University to join the Trump administration.
“I took this job to make sure that we do the research that advances the health needs of the American people.”
The hearing came a day after more than 60 NIH employees sent an open letter to Bhattacharya condemning policies they said undermined the agency’s mission and the health of Americans.
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They’ve begun calling it the “Bethesda Declaration”—a symbolic title that references both the National Institutes of Health’s suburban D.C. campus and the involvement of Jay Bhattacharya, a key figure behind the 2020 “Great Barrington Declaration,” which famously challenged COVID-19 lockdown measures.
Since President Trump’s second inauguration on January 20, the NIH has canceled more than 2,100 research grants—amounting to roughly $9.5 billion—as well as $2.6 billion in contracts, according to figures compiled by the independent tracker, Grant Watch.
The cuts have hit a wide range of scientific research, from studies on gender and the health impacts of climate change to groundbreaking work on Alzheimer’s and cancer.
This aggressive rollback marks a sweeping transformation of the U.S. scientific landscape. In just the early months of his new term, Trump has slashed funding, taken aim at universities, and overseen large-scale layoffs of scientists across multiple federal agencies—signaling a deliberate and deeply controversial reshaping of the nation’s research priorities.