By M. Anthony Mills
The New Atlantis
April 03, 2025
In the wake of Covid, trust in scientific and medical experts has eroded and become starkly polarized, threatening the ability of science agencies to sustain broad public support. The National Institutes of Health in particular has become a lightning rod, due to the controversial roles of Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins during the pandemic as well as the agency’s funding of research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Many Americans have grown reluctant to delegate political power to such expert bureaucracies.
With Donald Trump’s return to the White House and Republican majorities in Congress, it seemed almost inevitable that the federal scientific establishment was in for a shake-up. President Trump’s selection of Jay Bhattacharya — best known today as a critic of the Covid response, but also a longtime advocate of science reform — to lead the NIH was a hopeful sign that the administration was serious about reform. These conditions created a historic opportunity to overhaul an institution that, though essential to scientific and medical progress, has for decades resisted many of the reforms that experts from across the ideological spectrum have argued are badly needed. But these hopeful prospects for reforming the NIH gave way to something else in the two months before Bhattacharya took office this week.
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