Trump Selects Jay Bhattacharya as NIH Chief

The physician is a professor of health policy at Stanford University

By Jacob Burg

11/26/2024Updated: 11/26/2024PrintX 1

President-elect Donald Trump chose Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a Stanford University health policy professor, to lead the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on Nov. 26.

Bhattacharya’s nomination follows that of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s choice for secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the agency that oversees the NIH. Both men face Senate confirmation hearings before either can assume office.

“Dr. Bhattacharya will work in cooperation with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to direct the nation’s medical research, and to make important discoveries that will improve health, and save lives,” Trump said in a statement.

The NIH oversees 27 institutes and centers, including the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), whose previous director was Dr. Anthony Fauci. As a federal agency, the NIH is the largest funder of biomedical and behavioral research worldwide, with a budget of $47.3 billion in fiscal year 2024.

Almost 83 percent of NIH funding consists of nearly 50,000 competitive grants to more than 300,000 researchers across thousands of universities, medical schools, and various research institutions in all 50 states. The NIH also uses 11 percent of its budget to support roughly 6,000 scientists at its laboratories in Bethesda, Maryland.

Currently serving as the 17th NIH director is Dr. Monica Bertagnolli. Nominated by President Joe Biden in 2023, Bertagnolli is an expert in clinical oncology, including research into the genetic drivers of gastrointestinal cancer development and inflammation’s role in leading to cancer growth.

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During his first administration, Trump retained Dr. Francis Collins, who was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009 to serve as the 16th NIH director. Collins retired as head of NIH in December 2021.

Bhattacharya, Trump’s nominee for the 18th NIH director, is known for speaking out against lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. Along with Harvard University’s Martin Kulldorff and Oxford University’s Sunetra Gupta, Bhattacharya co-authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which detailed the authors’ concerns of “damaging physical and mental health impacts” from extended public lockdowns in 2020.

Bhattacharya would be Kennedy’s subordinate if both are confirmed by the Senate next year.

Kennedy has said he would move to fire hundreds of NIH employees on his first day at HHS.

“We need to act fast, and we want to have those people in place on Jan. 20, so that on Jan. 21, 600 people are going to walk into offices at NIH and 600 people are going to leave,” he said at the Nov. 9 Genius Network Annual Event in Scottsdale, Arizona.

In September, Kennedy told The Epoch Times that he would target the uptick in autism diagnoses, autoimmune diseases, and neurodevelopment disorders in recent years at the NIH. Kennedy has faced criticism for linking early childhood vaccines to autism after a 1998 Lancet paper purported to establish a correlation. The study’s authors later retracted the paper for methodological errors, and subsequent research has repeatedly found no links between vaccines and autism cases.

The Associated Press, Joseph Lord, and Jeff Louderback contributed to this report.