NIH Director to Resign Before Trump’s Inauguration

National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Monica Bertagnoli will step down on January 17, she told staff this week, ending her tenure as head of the $48 billion biomedical research agency after just one year.

“I am very proud of what the NIH has been able to accomplish in such a short time under my leadership,” Bertagnoli said in his announcement, citing a list of initiatives launched that he hopes the next administration will continue.

The NIH has generally been an agency with bipartisan support, and Bertagnoli’s predecessor, Francis Collins, served three administrations spanning more than 12 years. But lingering Republican anger over handling the Covid-19 pandemic has put the NIH squarely in the partisan crosshairs.

The agency faced widespread criticism, which particularly targeted leaders like Collins and Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years.

Bertagnoli has spent much of the past year trying to rally support among House and Senate lawmakers who want to implement dramatic changes, including shrinking the agency from 27 separate agencies and centers to 15.

Other proposals include a maximum two-term term limit for institute directors, adding new oversight mechanisms for grantees and adding new restrictions on research grants that present national security risks.

President-elect Trump has nominated his own NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, a health economist at Stanford University, who could lead some of the major restructuring efforts that Bertagnoli has begun to work on.

Bhattacharya was one of the authors of an open letter called “The Great Barrington Declaration”, which criticized the Covid mandate and called for “herd immunity”.

Trump’s health team also included Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the nominee to lead the NIH’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services.

Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic who also questions the safety of fluoridated water, has called for the suspension of infectious disease research at the NIH in favor of focusing on chronic diseases as part of his “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.

Kennedy called for hundreds of NIH staff members to be fired, a task that would be difficult without congressional action.