The premier health research funding agency in the US has had a tumultuous time since Donald Trump’s presidential return, and things are only going from bad to worse.
When Donald Trump returned to the US presidency in January 2025, many biomedical researchers were uneasy about the antiscience turn that parts of the Republican Party had taken in recent years. But they hoped that the strong bipartisan consensus in Congress in support of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) would help shield the agency from serious damage.
Now, a little over a year into the reign of the health and human services secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr and NIH director Jay Bhattacharya, that guarded optimism has given way to despair. Read more in BMJ.