Amid the flood zone of today’s Washington, the confirmation hearing for Jayanta (Jay) Bhattacharya’s nomination as director of NIH was remarkably calm.
The House Republicans have narrowly pushed through a FY25 budget resolution, setting off a tangle of life-and-death sequelae for access to health insurance through Medicaid and Obamacare, and through a second-order effect, biomedical research.
As NCI employees and others at HHS were receiving notices of termination, national cancer organizations called on Congress “to restore stability to NIH.”
Robert F. Kenedy Jr., an antivaccine advocate and President Trump’s MAHA nominee, has cleared a key hurdle to be confirmed as secretary of Health and Human Services.
In two raucous back-to-back hearings on Jan. 29 and Jan. 30, anti-vaccine crusader Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was grilled by members of the United States Senate Finance Committee and the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee as the Trump administration seeks his confirmation as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services.
On Saturday, Dec. 21, Congress passed a new spending package, narrowly averting a government shutdown.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., President-elect Donald Trump’s choice for HHS secretary, is unfit for that role and should not be confirmed, 77 Nobel laureates said in a letter to members of the U.S. Senate.
The Biden administration has left NIH in a weakened state, intensifying politicization of science on Capitol Hill and eroding the bipartisan support the government’s premier biomedical research agency has traditionally enjoyed.
The Senate Appropriations Committee voted to provide significant increases to federal health agencies in fiscal year 2025, including raises of nearly $2 billion for NIH and $270 million for NCI.
Two Republican leaders in the House of Representatives have published a “framework” for reforming NIH—consolidating the agency’s 27 institutes and centers into 15—arguing that a fundamental rethinking of NIH’s structure would fix what they describe as a “system rife with stagnant leadership, as well as research duplication, gaps, and misconduct.”
