‘Years of work thrown away’: scientists criticize Trump cuts for health

In the letter, members of the NIH team said the agency had terminated 2,100 survey concessions, totaling about $ 9.5 billion, and another $ 2.6 billion in contracts since President Donald Trump took office on January 20. Contracts usually support research, from equipment coverage to nursing staff working on clinical tests.

These terminations “throw away years of hard work and millions of dollars” and endanger patients’ health, says the letter. NIH’s clinical trials “are being interrupted without regard to participants’ safety, abruptly interrupting medications or leaving participants with implants of non -monitored devices.”

In a shared statement with Reuters, Bhattacharya said the employee’s letter “has some fundamental misconceptions about the political guidelines that NIH has taken in recent months … However, respective disagreement in science is productive. We all want NIH to be successful.”

In previous comments, Bhattacharya has promised to support Kennedy’s agenda, Make America Healthy Again, and said that means concentrating federal government “limited resources” directly in the fight against chronic diseases. In his Senate confirmation hearings in March, Bhattacharya said she would guarantee that scientists who work at NIH and are funded by the agency to have the resources they need to fulfill their mission.

NIH is the largest public biomedical research funder in the world and has long been bipartisan support for US parliamentarians. The Trump government proposed to cut $ 18 billion, or 40%, from the NIH budget next year, which would leave the agency with $ 27 billion. According to NIH employees, nearly 5,000 NIH employees and service providers were fired during the US health agencies by Kennedy.

A spokesman for the US Department of Human Health and Human Services, which supervises NIH, said agency employees should evolve to meet constantly changing priorities and ensure the good use of taxpayer money. It also defended NIH financing decisions, saying the agency was “working to remove the ideological influence of the scientific process.”