Washington D.C. – Jay Bhattacharya, the Trump administration’s simultaneous Director of the National Institutes of Health and Acting Director of the CDC, somehow found the time to appear at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing today. In February, Bhattacharya took on “the additional role” at the CDC after leading the NIH into total disarray over the last year (see lowlights below). Bhattacharya’s ability to perform two extremely important health department roles effectively, when he has been negligent and ‘ineffectual’ in his original post, remains a huge question mark for those who care about public health– and should greatly concern lawmakers overseeing his work.
“As Jay Bhattacharya actively drives one health department into the ditch, Donald Trump and RFK Jr. did the least responsible thing they could for our public health – they handed him the keys to another,” said Kayla Hancock, Director of Protect Our Care’s Public Health Project. “At the NIH, Bhattacharya has prolonged an expertise vacuum by refusing to fill critical vacancies that used to study things like deadly disease. Bhattacharya is a walking void of leadership that only gets out of bed to enact more politically motivated cuts to life-saving research. Preventable diseases like measles are roaring back under RFK Jr.’s dangerous anti-vax agenda, and Donald Trump found the perfect empty suit to keep doing nothing about it at the CDC.”
Bhattacharya’s Allergy to Leadership Is Endangering Lives:
GRANTS CANCELLED, SCIENCE HOBBLED: Bhattacharya’s NIH cancelled dozens of grants focused on vaccine hesitancy and acceptance because the research no longer aligned with the agency’s priorities. A New York Times analysis of NIH awards found that in just the first six months of Trump and RFK Jr’s tenure, the agency terminated 1,389 medical research grants and delayed funding for more than 1,000 additional projects, disbursing about $1.6 billion less than the prior year over a comparable period. In the end, roughly over 2,000 NIH grants were cancelled or frozen in 2025, touching every area of science and medicine, with only about half later reinstated, often after legal or political pressure. Nationally, NIH. grants to universities are down by more than 90 percent in the current fiscal year and the National Cancer Institute hasn’t made a single grant. A former NIH scientist is now suing the Trump administration for illegal firing over research cuts. In December, Bhattacharya led a new effort to claw back critical health research grants based on nothing but racism.
CLINICAL TRIALS HALTED, LIVES ON THE LINE: On Bhattacharya’s watch, dozens of NIH‑funded clinical trials — 383 out of 11,008 total — were interrupted by funding cuts in 2025. Those disrupted trials span cancer, infectious diseases, cardiovascular disease, mental health, and reproductive health, and together involve at least 74,311 patients already enrolled in “active, not recruiting” studies who signed up on the expectation that their care and follow‑up would be completed. Researchers warn that shutting off support mid‑stream wastes years of prior investment and risks discouraging patients from volunteering for future studies.
UNACCEPTABLE VACANCIES: Following indiscriminate mass federal health worker layoffs early last year, as of December, Bhattacharya’s NIH was still racing to fill almost half of its most important roles, with 13 vacant directorships out of 27 institutes and centers. Now, NIH review panels are due to lose all members by the end of 2026. Overall, federal agencies involved with biomedical research and public health lost 36,146 employees between September 2024 and December 2025 according to the Partnership for Public Service.
AN “INEFFECTUAL FIGUREHEAD” INCAPABLE OF PERFORMING ONE JOB, LET ALONE TWO: A December article in The Atlantic pulled back the curtain on Bhattacharya’s incompetence and apathy as head of NIH: “[I]nside the agency, officials describe Bhattacharya as a largely ineffectual figurehead, often absent from leadership meetings, unresponsive to colleagues, and fixated more on cultivating his media image than on engaging with the turmoil at his own agency.” Despite mounting evidence that he is running NIH into the ground and the fact that he has no formal training in public health, Bhattacharya was rewarded with a second agency to run in February when he was named acting director of the Centers for Disease Control by President Trump and RFK Jr.
COVID DEATH DENIER: Bhattacharya was a strong critic of the COVID-19 response. He called vaccine mandates an “authoritarian violation of human rights” and recommended herd immunity or mass infection as a solution to the pandemic. In March 2020, Bhattacharya wrongly predicted the COVID-19 death toll would cap out at around 40,000 people in the United States. He backed up this prediction with an April 2020 study that found the risks of COVID-19 to be overstated. He then called for rollbacks on lockdowns in October 2020, during which 22,000 new deaths occurred. As of April 2023, over 1,130,000 deaths occurred due to COVID-19.
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