NIH Is Tightening Its Ideological Noose

By Dave Levitan | July 15, 2025 | 1:25pm

Photo by Duane Lempke/Wikimedia Commons

Trump Administration NIH

The National Cancer Institute’s Board of Scientific Advisors, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, the US Preventive Services Task Force — and now the National Institute’s of Health’s advisory councils, which provide final sign-off on the billions of dollars in biomedical research funding NIH is supposedly tasked with distributing. All of these advisory bodies have been targeted by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and his underlings including NIH director Jay Battacharya, an overarching effort to stem the flow of outside expertise into the nation’s health and research apparatus and replace it with ideologically blinkered bullshit.

The latest move against the advisory councils was reported on Monday by Max Kozlov at Nature. The picture is a grim one:

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“NIH staff members have been instructed to nominate replacements that are aligned with the priorities of the administration of US President Donald Trump — and have been warned that political appointees might still override their suggestions and hand-pick alternative reviewers.”

The advisory councils for each of NIH’s institutes act as the last step after more specialized study sections determine which grant applications should be funded. The councils are made up of outside experts, and are vetted carefully; they are rarely let go after that, and the mass firing event is essentially unheard of.

The goal here is clear: outside expertise will almost universally align against the stated goals of Trump, RFK and Battacharya, whether regarding vaccines or health disparities or pretty much any other research topic on which they collectively are more wrong than science might have previously deemed possible. They don’t want advice, they want compliance, and are taking the easiest steps to achieve it. These sorts of advisory boards and committees do not have the sort of legal protections that federal employees theoretically enjoy (such as they are, these days), and so disbanding or replacing them generally isn’t the kind of thing that pesky judges will try and stop. Sometimes it all happens very quietly; while bodies like ACIP make national news, who even knows that Jay Battacharya is going to replace en masse his Advisory Committee to the Director?

Actual experts, allowed to speak freely, would tell HHS leadership that they are very wrong, and very dangerous. If the wrong and dangerous zealots don’t feel like hearing that, why would they?