The National Institutes of Health has been in the crosshairs of the Trump administration from the start. The staff there have been speaking out behind the scenes all along, but on Monday they changed tactics. Hundreds of current and former NIH employees, some anonymous and some using their real names, issued a public statement to director Jay Battacharya, decrying the ongoing destruction of the country’s biomedical research enterprise.
“For staff across the National Institutes of Health (NIH), we dissent to Administration policies that undermine the NIH mission, waste public resources, and harm the health of Americans and people across the globe,” read the statement, titled the Bethesda Declaration and explicitly modeled after the Battacharya-led 2020 pile of Covid bullshit, the Great Barrington Declaration. “We are compelled to speak up when our leadership prioritizes political momentum over human safety and faithful stewardship of public resources.”
They go on to detail how NIH has terminated more than 2,000 grants totaling almost $10 billion as well as $2.6 billion more in contracts, and how the agency is undermining work on vaccines, health impacts of climate change, health disparities, gender identity and sexual health, and more. They make some very simple, obvious points about the nature of the ongoing cuts — “Ending a $5 million research study when it is 80% complete does not save $1 million, it wastes $4 million” — and highlight the interruptions to global collaboration and more.
“This spending slowdown reflects a failure of your legal duty to use congressionally-appropriated funds for critical NIH research,” the Declaration states. “Each day that NIH continues to disrupt research, your ability to deliver on this duty narrows.”
The signers of the Declaration come from “every Institute and Center at NIH,” and in many cases include people who were fired in the probationary bloodbath or the subsequent reduction in force. “In addition to the named signers, we include anonymous signers and speak for countless others at NIH who share our concerns but who — due to a culture of fear and suppression created by this Administration — chose not to sign their names for fear of retaliation,” they wrote.
Sources inside NIH have told Splinter in recent days that the mood there is, unsurprisingly, almost impossibly grim. The Declaration, though perhaps unlikely to sway the likes of Bhattacharya and his boss RFK Jr, represents an obviously gutsy attempt to fight back in some small way — as they note, the director himself has recently said that “Dissent is the very essence of science,” and “…dissenting voices need to be heard and allowed.” We’ll see now just how willing he is to walk that particular walk.
GET SPLINTER RIGHT IN YOUR INBOX
The Truth Hurts
