Senators grill NIH director on massive budget cuts

By Sarah Owermohle, CNN

(CNN) — National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya faced critical questions from both Republican and Democratic senators Tuesday as he sought to defend the Trump administration’s sweeping plans to reorganize the agency and slash budgets for medical research.

Senate Appropriations Chairwoman Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, swiftly criticized the current budget cuts and proposed changes, including a nearly 40% reduction to the National Institute of Aging’s spending and 40% overall cuts to the agency’s overall $48 billion budget.

“As the senator representing … the oldest state in the nation, this is a particular concern,” Collins said. “I know personally what it means to so many American families.”

The senator also said caps on indirect spending for universities are “so poorly conceived” and have harmed U.S. medical research. “It is leading to scientists leaving the United States for opportunities in other countries. It’s causing clinical trials to be halted and promising medical research to be abandoned,” Collins said.

A federal court has paused the 15% cap on payments for indirect costs, but the administration assumed savings from the change in its 2026 fiscal year budget.

Collins pressed Bhattacharya to consult with Kelvin Droegemeier, a scientific adviser during President Trump’s first term, who has proposed alternative models for university grant spending. Bhattacharya said he cannot discuss the current cost cap because of ongoing litigation, but is open to working with Congress on potential reforms to the grant spending system.

The NIH director defended certain administrative changes while distancing himself from others, such as a pause on Northwestern University’s grant funding, saying some terminations happened before he assumed his role.

In answering Democratic Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin about overall cuts, Bhattacharya took responsibility for other sweeping grant cancellations. “There’s changes in priorities at the NIH to move away from politicized science, I made those decisions,” he said.

The hearing room was filled with purple-garbed advocates for Alzheimer’s disease research and representatives of the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network dressed in light blue.

Baldwin harshly criticized the proposed $18 billion reduction to the NIH’s total spending, saying cuts will bite as the NIH funds 15,000 fewer medical research projects.

“While I think Congress will reject your budget request, it clearly shows the administration’s intent,” Baldwin said. “How is this proposal anything but intentionally sabotaging biomedical research?”

Bhattacharya said he is “happy to work with Congress” on the budget and more flexible spending on medical research.

Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, interrogated Bhattacharya on the number of NIH departures since mass layoffs and reorganization plans. The senator said that she spoke with Bhattacharya on the phone last week, but still, “for months” has not received answers about how many people have left the agency since the initial Department of Government Efficiency shakeups began this February.

“Over the past few months, this administration has fired and pushed out nearly 5,000 critical employees across NIH, prevented nearly $3 billion in grant funding from being awarded, and terminated nearly 2,500 grants, totaling almost $5 billion for life-saving research that is ongoing, that includes clinical trials for HIV and Alzheimer’s disease,” Murray said.

Bhattacharya said that 25 people in NIH’s clinical center were laid off as part of the reduction of force plan, but that he could not provide the full figure of how many people have left NIH since the reorganization started. Murray asked for those figures by the end of Tuesday.

Other Democratic senators questioned the rapid, mass terminations of hundreds of grants that included words like diversity, equity, race, disparity, and gender. Those March and April terminations total, by some estimates, between at least $1.8 and $2.7 billion in funding.

“I guess what I’d like from you is an admission that that was too rough of a cut and you still have some work to do in untangling,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii.

Schatz added that by at least one expert’s estimation, untangling the frozen and terminated grants could take 18 months.

Bhattacharya said that he “established a process for those grant terminations and decisions” and “hundreds of people have appealed.”

The NIH director was sworn into his role on April 1, after many of those DOGE-led terminations took place. But he said that appeals will move swiftly.

“It won’t take 18 months. It’ll take weeks to get through those appeals. We’ve reversed many of them,” he told the Senate panel. “I mean, I didn’t take this job to terminate grants. I took this job to make sure that we do the research that advances the health needs of the American people.”

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