Biology

Democrats on a key Senate spending committee today provided a less than warm welcome to the National Institutes of Health (NIH) director, who was called in to testify about the agency’s 2026 budget proposal. The politicians slammed health economist Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya for freezes and cuts to thousands of grants and other moves by President Donald Trump’s administration that they say are dismantling U.S. biomedical research. And key Republicans on the Senate appropriations panel joined with Democrats in indicating they are unlikely to go along with the White House’s proposal to slash the agency’s budget by 40% in 2026.

Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R–WV), chair of the subcommittee that oversees NIH’s budget, noted in her opening remarks that “this will be a challenging year for appropriations, yet supporting biomedical research is a priority for me … I, along with many of my colleagues on this committee, think it is important that America remains the leader in biomedical innovation and research.”

And Senator Susan Collins (R–ME), who chairs the full appropriations committee, called the proposed cut to NIH’s budget “so disturbing” and said “it would undo years of congressional investment in NIH and it would delay or stop effective treatments and cures.” It would also risk the United States falling behind China in biomedical research, she said.

The 96-minute hearing was Bhattacharya’s first appearance before lawmakers since he became head of NIH on 1 April, the week of a second wave of mass layoffs at the agency. Since then, concerns within the biomedical community and among lawmakers have only escalated as NIH has continued to delay funding, cut grants on politically sensitive topics, and impose blanket funding freezes on universities because of allegedly discriminatory policies.

In the packed hearing—purple-sashed Alzheimer’s disease patient advocates dominated the audience—Bhattacharya said a decline in U.S. life expectancy and growing distrust of NIH during the COVID-19 pandemic point to a “need for reform at the NIH.” He faced sharp questions about his plans, although the subsequent exchanges were less fiery than two recent hearings where his boss, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., sparred with lawmakers on topics such as vaccines.

The subcommittee’s top Democrat, Senator Tammy Baldwin (WI), and Senator Patty Murray (WA), the lead Democrat on the full appropriations committee, pressed Bhattacharya on the ouster of 5000 NIH employees, and the killing of nearly 2500 grants worth $4.9 billion. Trump is “systematically dismantling the American biomedical research enterprise that is the envy of the world,” Murray said.

Bhattacharya held his calm during his attempts to respond. Asked who is making decisions about the grant cuts—NIH, the White House budget office, or the White House task force known as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)—he said it “depends on the specifics.” Changes in priorities and cuts to “politicized science” are his decisions, he said. Freezes on university grants were “joint with the administration.” He added that he expects those freezes to be “temporary” and said they should be lifted after “settlements.”

Yet Bhattacharya also acknowledged that some grants were inadvertently caught up by broad searches for flagged words denoting a controversial topic, such as diversity, even though the meaning was nonpolitical—such as a project noting attempts to recruit diverse clinical trial participants. DOGE members have been conducting such word searches to target grants since before Bhattacharya came to NIH. The director said he has set up a “process for appeal” that should result in some grants being restored within "weeks.” “I didn’t take this job to terminate grants,” he said. Senator Brian Schatz (D–HI) offered some sympathy: “I know you have to survive in this administration,” he said.

Murray noted that by her count, at least 150 clinical trials including ones on HIV vaccines , ovarian cancer, and diabetes have been terminated this year and wanted to know how many would be trimmed in 2026 if the 40% cut goes through. “I don’t have the numbers,” Bhattacharya said, but he acknowledged there would be fewer trials funded by the agency.

Others on the panel asked how the budget proposal’s plan to fold NIH’s 27 institutes into just eight would affect research in areas such as addiction and nursing. ( The nursing institute and three others would be eliminated .) Bhattacharya insisted that “important” research would continue. “The key thing is not the reorganization of the NIH,” but “the activities,” he said.

Collins also took issue with a new NIH policy to slash overhead payments included with grants from the current average of about 50% to a uniform 15% rate. The cut, paused for now as a judge reviews a legal challenge to it, could effectively reduce U.S. biomedical funding by billions of dollars. The rate cap is “poorly conceived” and causing biomedical researchers to leave the U.S., she said.

Collins asked whether Bhattacharya has considered an effort led by Kelvin Droegemeier, director of the White House science office in the first Trump administration, to develop “new models” for determining how much an institution should get for overhead. He said that effort is “quite promising.”

Asked by several lawmakers about the biggest question on their minds—how Trump can justify a 40% cut to NIH—Bhattacharya declined to say. He instead answered that NIH’s final budget will be the result of “collaboration” and “negotiation” with Congress.

Just 10 years ago, 900 scientists working with two of the biggest and most sensitive scientific devices ever built made a discovery that opened new eyes on the universe. The twin detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) spotted ripples in space itself set off when two massive black holes 1.3 billion light-years away spiraled into each other. For the first time, humans had detected an astrophysical object with something besides electromagnetic radiation. It was a dramatic demonstration of general relativity, Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity, and it marked the birth of a new field, gravitational wave astronomy.

Now, however, a budget-cutting plan by the administration of President Donald Trump would close one of the two LIGO interferometers, enormous L-shaped optical instruments in which light bounces between mirrors in arms 4 kilometers long. The move would save roughly $20 million while drastically cutting LIGO’s ability to identify and localize the cataclysmic celestial events that produce gravitational waves. Physicists say it would largely eliminate the field LIGO birthed. “You’re killing a newborn baby,” warns Gianluca Gemme, an astrophysicist with Italy’s National Institute for Nuclear Physics and spokesperson for Virgo, a smaller gravitational wave detector near Pisa.

Three early leaders of the LIGO effort won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics for the first detection of a gravitational wave. The LIGO detectors in Louisiana and Washington state, working together with the less sensitive Virgo, have now captured signals from more than 300 sources, almost all black hole mergers.  And all the detectors continue to gain sensitivity through upgrades, says David Reitze, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology and director of LIGO. “We’re at the tip of the iceberg in terms of the amount of science we can do.”

However, in its proposed budget for 2026, the Trump administration would slash the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) $9 billion budget by 57%, and, as part that cut, trim LIGO’s annual operating budget from $48 million to $29 million. The proposed budget explicitly calls for eliminating one of LIGO’s interferometers, but doesn’t specify which one. In a two-sentence email to Science , an NSF spokesperson said the plan reflects “a strategic alignment of resources in a constrained fiscal environment.”

The loss would inflict disproportionate damage on the observatory’s scientific reach, scientists say. Researchers would find it more difficult to distinguish a black hole collision in the distant cosmos from a nearby seismic tremor or anything else that shakes the remaining interferometer. A real gravitational wave likely produces signals in both U.S. detectors within 10 milliseconds, the time it takes the ripple to cover the cross-country distance. Without the ability to compare data from the two instruments, detections would be less sure and their rate would fall at least 25%, Reitze says, and possibly much more.

With a single detector LIGO would also lose the ability to roughly locate the source of a signal on the sky—the key to its working as an observatory. LIGO showed the power of source localization in 2017 when it, working with Virgo, detected two neutron stars spiraling into each other. Around the globe and in space, myriad telescopes across the electromagnetic spectrum wheeled to see the dramatic explosion that ensued, a so-called kilonova that produced a gamma ray burst and spewed gold and other newly formed elements. Having more than one LIGO detector made that possible, says Roger Blandford, a theoretical astrophysicist at Stanford University. “There’s a reason they built two of them.”

To locate a source, researchers use the arrival time of the signals at different detectors to triangulate. If Virgo and the two LIGO detectors all see a signal, they can now locate its source to as little as 5 square degrees. The two LIGO detectors can also locate a source to a reasonably small circle on the sky. But a single LIGO detector can do little better than half the sky, Reitze says. “Astronomers look at that and go, ‘Why did you even wake us up?’”

Closing a LIGO interferometer would also likely mean cutting scientific staff, a prospect that worries some people more than anything else. “There’s a whole culture there that has worked together to build these two magnificent facilities,” Blandford says, “and you don’t re-create this just by hiring some people in an ad.” Gabriela Gonzalez, a physicist and LIGO member at Louisiana State University, notes that the majority of graduate students who work on LIGO go on to jobs in high-tech industries. “It’s not just the science results, it’s the people we train that will be lost.”

France Córdova, an astrophysicist who served as NSF director from 2014 to 2020, says the proposed lopping of LIGO in half may be, oddly, a testament to the prestige of the project even in the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB). “Somebody in OMB understands that this was significant enough not to cancel it altogether, but didn’t understand the science” well enough to know why it couldn’t be cut in half, she speculates.

Physicists are still hopeful the proposed closure isn’t set in stone. “We’re having discussions with NSF to understand better where it came from and what it really means,” Reitze says. “Is it binding language or is there some latitude?” Gonzalez notes that Congress sets the agency’s final budget. “Legislators are smart,” she says. “I know that they are in difficult positions, and they do a very difficult job, but they listen to people, and we are talking to them.”

The science reform movement—which aims to improve the rigor of research—has unwittingly handed the administration of President Donald Trump a way to attack science, critics say.

Trump’s executive order calling for “gold standard science”— widely interpreted as an attempt to target findings that are inconsistent with the administration’s political agenda—was a foreseeable outcome of a movement that overstated the problems in science, according to some researchers. But science reformers say integrity concerns are too crucial to tamp down over fears of misuse.

The 23 May order points to a “reproducibility crisis” and high-profile cases of data falsification. It calls for science to be transparent and reproducible, and to acknowledge uncertainty. Those goals are familiar to Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science (COS), a nonprofit that has pushed to improve science through measures such as sharing data openly and describing a study plan in full before embarking on it. But 6 days after Trump signed the order, COS released a statement describing the dangers it poses and how its goals depart from those of the reform movement.

Nosek says the order treats ideas for reform as requirements rather than targets, when even the best studies are unlikely to meet every criterion: “The implication is that policymakers won’t be able to use the best available evidence. … And that is in nobody’s interest.” The order also empowers political appointees to enforce its vision of scientific integrity, meaning researchers whose work is deemed to fall short face disciplinary action, Nosek says. And it could also make it easier for courts to throw out scientific evidence that’s not deemed up to standard, warns Joe Bak-Coleman, a collective behavior scientist at the University of Washington.

Bak-Coleman and others say the reformers should have seen that their claims and concerns could be weaponized by antiscience movements, and done more to prevent that. “The writing was on the wall in huge letters,” says Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol, who points to attempts by the tobacco industry to introduce “sound science” legislation and sponsor “research integrity” symposia as early as the 1990s.

The reform movement gathered momentum in psychology in the early 2010s, when high-profile failed replications raised concerns that much of the psychological literature was not robust. Critics pointed to problems such as publication bias—the tendency of journals to only publish positive findings and reject studies that found no effect, skewing the overall picture of the literature. They also noted some scientists’ tendency to dig around in their data until they came up with favorable results.

These and other “questionable research practices” were driving a literature full of false findings, the reformers said. Various studies subsequently found that many psychology findings could not be replicated . Similar concerns were raised in economics , neuroscience , and other fields , giving rise to the idea of a “replication crisis.”

But the “crisis” narrative was overblown, Bak-Coleman and others say. “Suddenly the whole conversation changed from ‘some of these fields are having certain issues’ to ‘science is in crisis,’” says University of Idaho metascientist Berna Devezer. That was unwarranted, she says. For a start, some of the problems driving psychology’s replication issues—such as fuzzy measurements of ill-defined concepts—do not plague many scientific fields. And she asks whether questionable research practices are widespread enough even within psychology to support claims of a crisis.

Nosek agrees that the term has been unhelpful: “We don’t use the crisis narrative.” Still, media coverage amplified the idea of science in crisis, and some people began to use the idea of a “replication crisis” to justify antiscience moves, Devezer says. In 2017, reformers were alarmed when the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives passed the HONEST Act, which aimed to restrict the Environmental Protection Agency to using only evidence with publicly available data and materials. The HONEST Act later died in the Senate , but conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation began to emphasize the idea that science is in crisis and needs reform, Lewandowsky says. “That narrative has been carefully constructed and curated over the last 10, 20 years.”

Bak-Coleman thinks metascientists and science reformers should have been more careful about how they communicated their ideas, avoiding the claim that the problems they identified affect all of science. Reformers could also have communicated with more humility and less certainty about the prevalence of questionable research practices and other issues, Devezer says. Although it’s difficult to predict how claims could be misused, “you don’t want to make it easy,” she says.

And reform advocates could also have done more to contextualize the failings of science within the bigger picture of its successes, Lewandowsky says. “I’m old enough to remember when HIV was a death sentence,” he says. “And now you can get life insurance.” There are significant problems in science, but its achievements are overwhelming, and a narrative that all of science is in crisis and needs total reform “throws the baby out with the bathwater, twice over.”

Devezer says reformers could learn from geneticists, who have long grappled with racists who weaponize and distort their findings. In both fields, “mostly good-faith people are making very strong claims that can easily be picked up by people in bad faith and used to achieve their ideological goals,” says Kevin Bird, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Davis. But there wasn’t as much warning for science reformers that their work could also be misused, he says.

Many geneticists have learned to write defensively, anticipating how their work could be distorted. They frame their papers carefully, understanding that many readers may never see more than the abstract, which makes it unhelpful to bury caveats deeper in the paper or in separate blog posts, Bird says. He thinks the executive order should be a wake-up call for science reformers to communicate more carefully.

Lewandowsky agrees. The work of reform is necessary, he says, but “let’s make sure that it isn’t done in a way that inadvertently makes us useful idiots of an antiscience movement.”

In an unprecedented move both feared and expected by public health proponents, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. yesterday fired en masse the 17 expert members of a committee that advises the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on what vaccines people in the United States should take and when. Conflicts of interest among members of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP), he alleged, were undermining public trust in vaccines.

The move, which appears to violate a pledge Kennedy made to a U.S. senator in order to secure his vote when nominated, prompted immediate outrage from public health and medical experts. The firings are “a dangerous and unprecedented action that makes our families less safe,” former CDC Director Tom Frieden, president and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, said in an emailed statement. “Politicizing the ACIP as Secretary Kennedy is doing will undermine public trust under the guise of improving it.”

ACIP recommendations determine which vaccines are added to the adult and childhood vaccine schedules, meaning U.S. insurers are required to cover them, and children in low-income households receive them for free.

In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal announcing the mass removals, Kennedy called them “a bold step in restoring public trust” for a committee “plagued with persistent conflicts of interest.” He also said ACIP “has become little more than a rubber stamp for any vaccine.” He cited a 1997 vote on a rotavirus vaccine in which several voting ACIP members had financial ties to rotavirus vaccinemakers . (CDC tightened its ACIP conflict rules in 2002.) Kennedy also cited a 2009 inspector general’s report that found “a systemic lack of oversight” in CDC’s enforcement of ACIP ethics rules. Today, Kennedy wrote: “These conflicts of interest persist.”

Yet a Science investigation published in March in response to similar claims then by Kennedy documented strict public disclosure requirements for ACIP members. They are required to divest financial interests related to vaccinemakers and to recuse themselves from votes where a conflict exists because a member is involved with a clinical trial of a vaccine or its competitor. Science also found that five of the 13 physicians on the committee received no industry payments in the several years before their service began, and the eight who did earned an average of just over $4000 annually, $3000 less than the average industry payment to U.S. specialist physicians.

The administration of former President Joe Biden last year appointed 13 committee members to 4-year terms, effectively locking in most of its membership until 2028, a reason Kennedy cited for his “clean sweep” approach.

Jason Schwartz, a vaccine policy expert at Yale University who has studied ACIP for decades, called the purge “profoundly misguided” in an email to Science . ACIP has been a global model of work that is “rigorous, transparent, and rooted in the best available science,” he said. “With today’s announcement, I’m not sure how much longer that will be the case.”

The move “will further fuel the spread of vaccine-preventable illnesses” amid an ongoing measles outbreak and declining rates of routine child vaccination, Bruce Scott, president of the American Medical Association, said in a statement .

HHS said in a statement yesterday that an ACIP meeting currently scheduled for 25, 26, and 27 June will proceed. The names of the new members will be publicly announced before that meeting, according to an HHS spokesperson.

ACIP members are not government employees, but historically have been academics, practicing physicians, epidemiologists, and vaccine scientists; there is one public representative on the committee. Members are paid honoraria, typically a few hundred dollars, for their time attending meetings and are reimbursed for travel.

Senator Bill Cassidy (R–LA), a physician and staunch vaccine backer who expressed reservations about voting to confirm Kennedy as HHS secretary before doing so, extracted public promises from the then-candidate not to meddle in vaccine regulation.

“If confirmed, he will maintain the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices without changes,” Cassidy said in a February Senate floor speech announcing his support for the nomination .

Cassidy took to social media yesterday to comment on Kennedy’s announcement. “Of course, now the fear is that the ACIP will be filled up with people who know nothing about vaccines except suspicion,” Cassidy posted on X . “I’ve just spoken with Secretary Kennedy, and I’ll continue to talk with him to ensure this is not the case.” Cassidy told a HuffPost reporter yesterday that Kennedy did not break his commitment, saying the health secretary had only agreed not to change the committee’s process, “not the committee [membership] itself.”

But Kennedy has already done an end-run around ACIP’s process, announcing on 27 May that CDC was removing COVID-19 vaccines for children and healthy pregnant people from the vaccine schedule. Normally, such a decision would come after ACIP reviewed the data and made a recommendation; such a review was underway for COVID-19 vaccines, but the committee had reached no decisions.

President Donald Trump’s administration is shuttering a network of centers funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that aims to prevent future pandemics. The research is “unsafe,” NIH has concluded.

The 10 Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases (CREID) were launched 5 years ago with a projected $82 million in funding to collect and characterize mosquito-borne viruses and other pathogens that could jump from animals to people. NIH had planned to renew the network this year.

But a 5 June stop-work order for one center states that the network’s research “has been deemed unsafe for Americans and not a good use of taxpayer funding. Current agency priorities do not support this work.” The message did not elaborate on the risks posed by the research, and a spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, did not respond to questions.

“I’m disappointed that this and other research aimed at identifying and preventing future pandemics has been deemed unsafe and useless,” Kris Smith, a CREID postdoctoral researcher at Washington State University works in Kenya, wrote on Bluesky.

The network’s research, conducted in Africa, Asia, and Latin America as well as the United States, involved collecting viruses from the wild, killing them, then studying their genomes, according to University of Saskatchewan virologist Angela Rasmussen, who protested the network’s closure on her blog yesterday. The centers also took blood samples from people who come into contact with animals to see whether they’ve developed antibodies to wild viruses.

A few studies worked with live viruses in high-containment labs, mainly to develop drugs and vaccines. But network scientists did not modify viruses in ways that make them more risky to people, Rasmussen writes. Trump and NIH Director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya are planning to crack down on such “gain-of-function” studies .

Virologist David Wang of Washington University in St. Louis, who led one center, calls the claim that CREID work was not safe “totally unsubstantiated.” In fact, “If we can detect and stop a virus where it starts, that directly makes America and American citizens safer,” says Wang, who calls the cancellation “incredibly short sighted.”

Trump has previously ended pathogen surveillance projects funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and CREID investigators knew they could be next . The network was also likely to face disruptions because of a new NIH policy revamping how it funds foreign collaborations .

CREID may also have been vulnerable because one center was run by the now-defunct EcoHealth Alliance , a U.S. nonprofit that collaborated with researchers in Wuhan, China, on virus studies that some scientists and conservative politicians allege could have sparked the COVID-19 pandemic. And a second CREID center funded in 2020 also got ensnared by the origins debate with one of its heads, Kristian Andersen, being accused of downplaying the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from the Wuhan lab in order to get the $9 million grant.

By canceling the network, NIH is “pandering to the lab-leak conspiracy theorists,” Wang says.