Out of His League and Clueless: NIH Staffers Speak Out on Director Bhattacharya

Jay Bhattacharya’s stint as director of the National Institutes of Health is off to a rocky start. At his first town hall last month, the former Stanford University health economist, who became known during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic for evangelizing mass infection as the path to herd immunity, was greeted by a largely stone-faced audience.

Things did not get much better from there. A joke in his opening remarks about the difficulty of the job turning his hair grayer did not land. Later, dozens walked out after he expressed support for the speculative lab leak explanation of COVID’s origins, which is disfavored by experts. During the Q&A session, he was heckled about cuts to research impacting minority communities.

”It’s good to have free speech,” Bhattacharya remarked during the walkout. “Welcome, you guys.”

But inside NIH, many are feeling unwelcome—and ready to be heard. Important Context spoke with a dozen people working at the agency in various roles and institutes, on both the intramural (internally funded) and extramural (grants) side. All painted a grim picture of an institution plagued by chaos, an unclear leadership structure, mismanagement, and widespread fear and demoralization due to capricious rule changes, restrictions, and research cuts.

One man they blamed? Jay Bhattacharya.

Due to clear personal and professional risks associated with whistleblowing and speaking out, we have kept the identities of these individuals anonymous, allowing each to decide how they are identified in this article. One staffer wished to be identified as a program officer and is quoted multiple times throughout this article. They are initially referred to as “a program officer” and subsequently as “the program officer.” A staffer who asked to be identified as extramural is also quoted in multiple places—first as “an extramural staffer,” then as “the extramural staffer.”

“It’s a total shit show,” one agency staffer told Important Context, explaining that Bhattacharya seemed unaware of how NIH operated when he arrived. They said he had been promising reforms that were already part of the agency’s work.

“His attitude coming in has just been so condescending, and so like, ‘Oh, we're going to make NIH great’…and ‘we're going to make…science transparent, and we're going to introduce all of these programs’ that, mind you, already exist,” the staffer said. “Like, these are things we actively do…You fired people that do those things that you say you want to do.”

Others we spoke to questioned Bhattacharya’s intentions, suggesting he had a dubious personal agenda. An extramural staffer described the current NIH leadership as “people settling grudges.” A scientist inside the agency said, “It’s very clear he has a vendetta against the NIH.”

Another NIH scientist told Important Context that Bhattacharya was “basically just trying to create an environment where lies can be treated the same as scientific truth and he and his cronies can like, jam through bullshit studies and then he can try to scream academic freedom.” They said that the way things were going, it looked like the NIH was “going to collapse on itself at some point,” adding that the current administration was “trying to kill most of what we do.”

“It is catastrophic,” they said. “The public should understand that [President Donald] Trump wants to kill U.S. science. And is succeeding.”

Prior to becoming NIH director, Bhattacharya had never worked in government or managed a large team. A professor and right-wing public health policy advocate, his nomination was seen by some of his allies as a sort of payback against his (and the president’s) perceived enemies. “Is this what winning looks like?” asked Bhattacharya’s longtime collaborator, Jeffrey Tucker, founder of the anti-vaccine dark money group the Brownstone Institute, in a blog post.

In particular, the choice of Bhattacharya for NIH was seen as a rebuke of the agency’s former director, Dr. Francis Collins, who stepped down from the position in 2021 and retired earlier this year. On his way out, Collins issued a statement pleading to protect his former staff against personnel cuts.

In October 2020, Collins had called Bhattacharya a “fringe epidemiologist” following the publication of the latter’s Great Barrington Declaration, which advocated a COVID herd immunity strategy reliant on mass infection of the general population with protections for the vulnerable only. Collins had been alarmed by the first Trump administration’s embrace of the document. In an email to Dr. Anthony Fauci, then the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, he called for a “quick and devastating published takedown of its premises.”

Collins was hardly the only critic of the document. The American Public Health Association and 16 other organizations put out an open letter rebuking it and World Health Organization Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called the herd immunity strategy “unethical.” But his email, which came to light through a public records request, shook Bhattacharya. The health economist began attacking Collins on social media and in various interviews and declared himself a victim of government censorship. He embraced the “fringe” label as a battle scar and even launched a Substack and podcast called “Science From The Fringe” with collaborator Bryce Nickels.

As the NIH nominee, Bhattacharya promised to protect open debate and disagreement within the agency, calling dissent “the very essence of science” during his Senate confirmation hearings. But in his brief time as director, the health economist has not lived up to his lofty pledges. His tenure at the agency has been marred by firings, research cuts, and restrictions on what can be studied and how staff can speak—all of which have rankled and disheartened longtime staff and fellows alike. Just this week, the agency announced it was terminating research into a potential HIV vaccine.

Insiders described Bhattacharya as “arrogant,” “in over his head,” “out of his league,” “out of his depth,” “clueless,” “weak,” and “full of shit.” The NIH director did not respond to our requests for comment.

“In some ways, I do feel vaguely sorry for him, because he is clueless, and he clearly does not know what he's doing,” one staffer said. “But he's also arrogant, and he thinks that he can just come in and tell us how to do our jobs, when he has no idea how science actually works.”

The problems began on Bhattacharya’s first day on the job. His breezy introductory email on April 1 coincided with a wave of firings. Across HHS, 10,000 workers received reduction in force (RIF) notices and another 10,000 left through the deferred resignation program. Of those let go, 1,200 were from NIH. The firings came on the heels of mass layoffs in February of probationary workers. One staffer compared the email to “climbing over a pile of bodies” to say hello.

Bhattacharya has claimed to have had no say in the firings, which are the subject of ongoing litigation and has sought to cast himself as a reformer to placate staff. At the town hall, for example, he said he would end a hated requirement that NIH workers send emails each week detailing five things they’d accomplished and pledged to fix supply shortages.

But his assurances did little to assuage broader concerns inside the agency.

“He's acting like his hands are tied, but he's full of shit,” one staffer said of Bhattacharya. “At best, he's feckless and spineless, but I think it's more that he has his own agenda and wants to empower/enrich himself at the expense of good research. Same with [former acting NIH Director Matthew] Memoli.”

“Overall, he seems not to know what's going on in his own institution,” they said. “He claims that we're not canceling grants, and yet we have whole slates of grants (per grants management) that we have to cancel…He's claiming not to be responsible for the illegal RIFs, but as far as I can tell, has done nothing to help bring RIFed employees back.”

Others were equally unflattering in their descriptions of Bhattacharya. A program officer told Important Context that the director “is in over his head but lacks the self-awareness to know that.” Another staffer said he came across like someone who “never learned how to be called out for being incorrect.” They accused him of “deflecting culpability for what is going on at NIH.”

”He wants to be liked by everyone but seems scared of those who put him in power,” they said. “He appears well out of his league (especially compared to Collins, [former Principal Deputy Director Lawrence] Tabak and [former Director Monica] Bertangnolli).”

Most of the individuals we spoke with said Bhattacharya appeared to prioritize his position inside the administration over his commitments to good science and academic freedom with one staffer calling him ”a mouthpiece for the Trump administration,” explaining that despite the hopes of those inside the agency that he might stand up to Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the administration over cuts and firings, Bhattacharya had instead left them “exposed.” Another staffer said that Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought was “really in charge.”

Important Context was warned that staffing reductions at NIH have caused “chaos” inside the agency and fueled growing concern that it will be unable to spend its budget. Staffers speculated that this disastrous outcome might be intentional—a way to justify spending cuts. The Trump administration’s leaked budget proposal for next year includes a staggering 44 percent cut for the NIH representing more than $20 billion.

“We may be able to get our contracts done, but it’s only by court order,” the extramural staffer said, referring to the pause on RIFs.

Another major concern among NIH insiders that spoke to Important Context was the way research was being handled at the agency. Some expressed concern that certain projects appeared to be skipping normal review processes—like Memoli’s universal flu vaccine. Most of the consternation, however, focused on restrictions on research and the cancellation of grants.

Important Context was told that on the extramural side, grant proposals were making their way through the entire review process only for the DOGE to reject them. We also heard of in-progress research being cut off seemingly arbitrarily or because its focus was on a topic disfavored by the administration—like studies involving specifically minority communities or gender. In April, the Trump administration announced that all NIH grant recipients would be required to certify that they do not “operate any programs that advance or promote” diversity, equity, and inclusion or Israel boycotts.”

One staffer called the research cuts “appalling” and “also most likely illegal,” noting that “staff are given almost no guidance about how to handle them, and we are not allowed to be transparent with grantees.”

“These cuts will kill people,” they said. “This isn't me being dramatic—lifesaving research is being stalled. We're talking about things like cancer research in Black populations, research into suicide prevention in queer youth, women's health research.”

The staffer noted that even if some of the grants are reinstated, “delaying funds isn't like smoothly landing a plane for a brief pause to refuel—it's more like crashing a plane into the side of a mountain.”

“If you can't pay your lab tech to come in and keep a cell culture going, for example, or keep breeding a transgenic mouse colony that took years to develop and establish, you can lose a ton of research in a matter of weeks,” they said.

The program officer told Important Context that agency staff “are all being forced to do work that is counter to our principles,” taking specific aim at clinical trials being terminated “midstream.”

“This cuts patients off from study meds in the middle of the treatment course or leaves them with implanted devices with no safety follow up,” they said. “In other cases, patients donated samples (an incredible gift!) with the understanding it would help understand their disease and help others with it. But researchers cannot follow through on that commitment and complete the research because the grant is terminated.”

They said that “transparency is another fundamental principle of science,” and noted that staff were being barred from communicating with grantees about executive orders—only science. “As if they don’t bear on the science,” they said.

The program officer speculated that Bhattacharya might be relying on “a lot of mental gymnastics to contort himself into believing he’s doing the right/best thing,” but said it ultimately did not matter because “either way, he is at fault.”

“No matter what he tells himself to sleep at night, people will suffer and potentially die because of the policies he’s allowing at NIH under his leadership,” they said.

The daylight between Bhattacharya’s rhetoric about academic freedom and his agency’s policies was a recurring theme in our discussions with NIH insiders. One staffer told Important Context that despite his “woe is me attitude” on “censorship,” Bhattacharya “continues to censor scientists and reduce academic freedom.” An NIH fellow, meanwhile, said, “I don’t believe he cares to preserve scientific integrity or make scientific progress.”

“He contradicts himself: In his town hall he stressed the importance of supporting and developing early career scientists and fellows, but then defended the illegal firing of probationary employees, which are primarily early career scientists,” they said, explaining that they said they knew people who had moved across the country for an NIH cancer prevention fellowship program only to find out that their funding had been cut and the agency would not cover relocation costs. “He also claims to value academic freedom but then considers certain subjects ‘ideological’ and not scientific.”

The fellow lamented that they had lost over a year of work because their projects related to climate change had been terminated. “Climate change research is undeniably crucial science, but [Bhattacharya’s] not willing to defend academic freedom if he worries it will hurt his standing within this administration.”

An NIH scientist noted that before this administration, “it would have been inconceivable to reject a paper for scientific views.”

One staffer, who described the state of the agency as “a horror show” with “no leadership like since January,” said they had “not been given one directive of what we should do and focus on—it's just what to terminate, ban, censor, review.” They said that as a result, the NIH had “an atmosphere of absolute fear and paralysis that's also causing a lot of people to, you know, just…be very paranoid.”

“Sometimes it doesn't even feel like we should be conducting our business in American English,” they said, referring to the administration’s prohibitions on certain words and phrases.

The staffer explained that if the topic is sensitive or controversial, “it has to be approved by a presidential appointee, and we don't know what that means.” They said the new administration had added several layers of review, which caused them to give up multiple speaking engagements. “I just couldn't…it was exhausting just thinking about the review that has to be done by presidential appointees,” they said.

Bhattacharya’s answer to growing concerns inside his agency about academic freedom has been to tout a new policy eliminating manuscript review for NIH researchers. But even under normal circumstances, such policy changes take time to implement across all institutes and centers. As of the writing of this article, the publication preclearance remained in effect according to staffers. The new policy was also not reflected on the NIH’s internal policies page based on a screenshot taken Friday obtained by Important Context. The page, last updated last on May 21, dictates that submissions to journals must still follow “standard [Institutes and Centers] approval processes.”

“They aren't doing a great job at updates,” the program officer said. “The communications guidance page still says to run any external comms through comms teams and pretty much every comms team was RIF'd April 1.”

An NIH scientist said they recently had a letter to the editor, which they wrote in response to a published paper, get “sent above my division director for additional review.” They said that had never happened before.

Staff frustrations came to head at the May 19 town hall, but the walkout—originally planned by the NIH Fellows United union over working conditions and later triggered early by the director’s lab leak remarks—and other disruptions were just the beginning, insiders told Important Context.

Despite his current unpopularity, Bhattacharya was not always disliked inside NIH. Several staffers said they had been tentatively hopeful about his nomination, that perhaps he would stand up for them against the administration. Some noted his involvement in the agency’s peer review panels. But the general view among those individuals we spoke to was that things were not getting better with the health economist in charge. They saw their new director as “weak”—more of a figurehead than a leader. One insider used the phrase “continuous free fall” to describe the agency on his watch.

“I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, because I heard he was a collegial, rigorous peer reviewer in the past,” one staffer said. “He should understand the rigor of the NIH funding process (as well as its limitations). But he is trying to please overlords while saying things he must know are false.”

Another said that while Bhattacharya had once been “respected,” “now he sounds like a joke, an ignorant political hack, every time he speaks…he comes across as someone who has sold his soul.”