A senior United States health official admitted on Tuesday that the Trump administration had gone too far in slashing billions of dollars from biomedical research grants and said steps were now being taken to restore some of the funding.
Jay Bhattacharya, Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), made the statement during a Senate committee hearing that scrutinised recent budget cuts to the NIH and additional reductions proposed by the White House for the upcoming fiscal year.
Bhattacharya told lawmakers that he had established an appeal process for affected scientists and laboratories, and noted that the NIH had already reversed many of the cancelled grants.
“I didn’t accept this position to terminate grants,” said the physician and health economist, who left his role as a professor at Stanford University to serve in the Trump administration.
“I accepted it to ensure that we conduct research that meets the health needs of the American people.”
The hearing took place a day after more than 60 NIH employees issued an open letter to Bhattacharya, criticising policies they claimed undermined the agency’s mission and harmed public health. They referred to their statement as the “Bethesda Declaration,” referencing both the NIH’s location in suburban Washington and Bhattacharya’s prior support of the controversial “Great Barrington Declaration,” which opposed COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020.
Since President Trump’s inauguration on January 20, the NIH has terminated approximately 2,100 research grants worth an estimated $9.5 billion, along with contracts valued at $2.6 billion, according to independent data from Grant Watch.
The cuts affected studies on gender health, the impacts of climate change, Alzheimer’s disease, and cancer.
Trump has embarked on a sweeping overhaul of America’s scientific institutions during the early months of his second term — slashing budgets, targeting universities, and overseeing widespread redundancies among federal research staff.
