Inside (the Beltway) Scoop

By: Ellen Kuo
Wednesday, March 12, 2025
Jay Bhattacharya Testifies Before Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee

On March 5, Senators had the opportunity to ask questions and make their concerns known to Jay Bhattacharya, President Donald Trump’s nominee to become the next director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Bhattacharya is a medical doctor, health economist, and professor at Stanford University.  As an investigator at Stanford’s Center for Demography and Economics of Health and Aging, he is known for his stance against the lockdowns during COVID-19 and mask mandates. During his testimony, he focused on five specific goals for NIH and expressed his love of NIH. Bhattacharya goals were to focus NIH research on chronic disease, ensure NIH science is replicable and reproducible, promote a culture of free speech at NIH, allow for dissent, recommit NIH to its mission to fund innovative, cutting-edge research rather than incremental research, and regulate risky research while embracing transparency in all NIH research. As a former member of the Biosafety Now Board, an organization dedicated to advocating independent oversight and responsible research practices to prevent lab generated pandemics, he echoed their concerns about risky research.

At the hearing, the nominee said he wanted to ensure NIH researchers had the resources they needed. He concurred with Senator Rand Paul’s desire to see changes to the grant committee makeup to focus on making America healthy, but he also understood the need for basic research. On the topic of cuts to Facilities and Administrative (F&A) costs, Bhattacharya said that at Stanford, it was on the order of 55 percent and that as an NIH grant recipient, he said the money that comes to him, the direct costs he understood where that money goes, but the indirect costs are kind of a tip, fifty-five percent tip on top of that, that goes to the institution. The decision by NIH to cut costs demonstrates a lot of distrust, Bhattacharya said, and wants to see money going into research. The nominee also wants the advisory councils to restart if he is confirmed. 

Senator Maggie Hassan told Bhattacharya that she did not want to see any hesitation from him or the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services when it comes to vaccines, which only turns the public off to their value in saving lives. He also concurred with Senator Roger Marshall that scientists from nontraditional places and early career researchers be able to obtain grants. When asked whether chronic disease research should come at the expense of infectious disease research, Bhattacharya said NIH could do both. However, he did note that the research on long COVID has not produced answers, but he would support the research. He also affirmed his commitment to follow the law and to follow the lead of Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to prohibit the use of fetal tissue from abortions in NIH funded research because there are people who morally object to mRNA vaccines made or developed with fetal stem cell lines. He said that in public health, we need to make sure the products of science are ethically acceptable to everybody.

On March 13, the committee plans to vote on his nomination.