NIH has long been a government “crown jewel” and is now a target

The National Institutes of Health, the world’s leading public funder of biomedical research, has an enviable track record. Research supported by the agency has led to more than 100 Nobel Prizes and supported more than 99 percent of drugs approved by federal regulators between 2010 and 2019.

No wonder the agency has been called the “crown jewel of the federal government.” But in January, when President-elect Donald J. Trump and congressional Republicans take control, the NIH could face a reckoning.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the new administration’s pick to be secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, routinely castigates federal scientists and is a vocal critic of conventional drugs and vaccines who has a long history of spreading falsehoods about the safety of vaccines.

He said he would lead the agency on a years-long “break” from infectious disease research and instead focus on chronic diseases.

And Mr. Trump’s pick for NIH director is Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the Stanford professor who rose to fame during the pandemic for supporting the widely maligned idea that the coronavirus should spread freely among healthy Americans. has called for a dramatic restructuring of the NIH, which he says is run by small-minded bureaucrats.

While even the agency’s advocates acknowledge that the NIH needs to be modernized, the radical reforms now proposed would be difficult, if not impossible, without years of legal battles and significant support from Congress, experts say.