Report on Research Compliance 23, no. 3 (March, 2026)
After 22 years as an NIH program officer, Elizabeth Ginexi reluctantly took early retirement in April, after witnessing a reduction-in-force of 40% of the staff at the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, where she had been since 2022.
Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employees were “surveilling us in our office building. We were not able to do our jobs anymore as everything was basically shut down and the DOGE/HHS political appointees were terminating NIH grants,” Ginexi told RRC. “I loved my job and I had fully expected to stay for at least another 10 years. But the job was no longer what it used to be.”
Said Ginexi, who has a master’s and a Ph.D. in applied social psychology from George Washington University: “I was, and still am, heartbroken. I still haven’t found another full-time job. The local D.C. metro job market is absolutely impossible. I am doing part-time hourly remote work here and there for a research team at Indiana University, and continuing my grueling job search.” Former colleagues still at NIH remain terrorized and powerless, she added.
HELP Unaware of Shocking Appointment
Congress recently ignored the 40% funding cut the Trump administration requested and took other steps members said would help preserve NIH’s funding abilities for the remaining months of fiscal year (FY) 2026, which ends Sept. 30. According to a summary issued by the Senate Appropriations Committee, the law “provides $48.7 billion in discretionary funding” for NIH, “an increase of $400 million.”[i]
The same day the funding bill became law, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya appeared before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee to discuss modernizing NIH. Although senators asked pointed questions about disrupted clinical trials and other polarizing changes Bhattacharya has implemented, the director did not mention—and they seemingly didn’t know—that just two weeks later, Bhattacharya would be named the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), serving at the top of both agencies.
The shocking news means CDC will be under its third leader and does little to quell the anxiety at that agency, among NIH staffers and research institutions. HHS confirmed this unprecedented appointment to RRC on Feb. 20, but would not answer any questions, including how long Bhattacharya will remain in charge of both agencies, whether there could be another interim director or if he will stay until a new CDC director is nominated and confirmed, a process that is neither simple nor speedy. HHS has yet to make an official announcement about the move.
Reflecting on the final funding bill, Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., touted the fact that it “rejects Trump’s plan to gut NIH funding. It, once again, rejects his illegal plan to set a cap that would devastate biomedical research institutes across the country. And it rejects Russ Vought’s scheme to have NIH award all of its multi-year grants in one lump sum—something that would mean thousands fewer grants awarded, and thousands fewer chances to discover medical breakthroughs.”[ii] She was referring to Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and a primary author of Project 2025.
Specifically, the law requires the following: “$150 million increase for cancer research; $100 million increase for Alzheimer’s disease research; $30 million increase for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; $30 million increase for the Office of Research on Women’s Health; $25 million increase for ALS research, fully funding the $100 million as authorized by the ACT for ALS Act of 2021; $20 million increase for the IMPROVE Initiative for research on maternal mortality; $12 million increase for BRAIN Initiative research; $10 million increase for diabetes research; $10 million increase for rare disease research; $9 million increase for the Undiagnosed Diseases Network; and a $5 million to implement the National Parkinson’s Project,” the summary states.
“Protecting NIH funding is a huge deal for researchers across the country—including in my home state of Washington, where places like UW, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, and so many others are leading the way on medical research that saves lives,” Murray added.
Budget ‘Is Not a Win’
Yet, all the praise seemed surreal to Ginexi, who dug into the weeds of the bill and understood the implications better than most. Since December, Ginexi has been sharing her thoughts via a Substack account in deeply detailed and informative posts. In December, she announced plans for “a series reflecting on what I learned over more than two decades working inside the U.S. biomedical research enterprise.” On Jan. 21, after the bill had been introduced but not enacted (that happened on Feb. 3), Ginexi posted a 2,000-word essay, “The NIH Funding Bill and the Uncertainty It Cannot Resolve.”[iii]
Ginexi told RRC she penned this post “because I was surprised that everyone in the news, on the [Capitol] Hill and in academia was celebrating the budget bill as a win. It is not a win. First of all, a flat budget is not a win. Second of all, Vought will force NIH to do the multi-year funding scheme again so there will be fewer awards again.”
Third, “the political people are still controlling what gets funded. The grants take forever to be cleared for pay and some will likely be denied. That is NOT a win. Finally, the NIH is running with a skeleton crew now. It’s just all so weird to be celebrating. I wrote that then and I still believe it now,” Ginexi said.
During the HELP hearing, Democratic senators condemned NIH’s grant terminations, saying the decisions left many patients without care. (They also shared numerous other concerns, including the growing number of vacancies among institute and center directors and the declining number of awards. RRC will follow these issues in subsequent stories.)
Bhattacharya: NIH ‘Reforming, Restructuring’
Bhattacharya was unflappable during the hearing, sticking to talking points he frequently expresses. He told the committee that one of his “top priorities “is to “rebuild public trust in the NIH, [implement] meaningful reforms that increase transparency, strengthen scientific rigor and ensure accountability,” which he called “necessary to bolster the NIH’s ability to meet America’s current and future public health needs.”[iv]
He added that, “under my leadership, reform is already underway. At the NIH, we are consolidating and restructuring core functions within the office of the director to enhance coordination and improve efficiency and strength and accountability.”
Examples include centralizing peer review, which he called “the basic and most important function of evaluating scientific grants. This consolidation is projected to save millions by eliminating duplication, while ensuring more consistent agnostic, rigorous scientific evaluations of research applications.”
A new office within Bhattacharya’s office “will support rigorous analysis of the NIH research portfolio with the mission of coordinating NIH investments to solve the replication crisis in biomedical sciences, leading to greater impact of our scientific investments on population health.” NIH’s “new unified funding strategy” will empower NIH “to make research portfolio decisions that are better aligned with the strategic priorities of the institutes,” said Bhattacharya, who also briefly discussed NIH’s plan to invest “in new human based models and emerging technologies to improve the translatability of research into human health and responsibly reduce animal research where scientifically appropriate.”
NIH will work with the “White House and other federal partners to develop and implement a policy for increased oversight of dangerous gain of function research,” he said.
HELP Committee Chair Sen. Bill Cassidy, R. La.—whose support is the reason Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Bhattacharya were confirmed—was critical of HHS’ decision to cancel “roughly $500 million in mRNA research,” and noted that Moderna had recently “announced it would no longer invest in late stage clinical trials for vaccines using mRNA technology.” This hearing took place prior to the Food and Drug Administration’s refusal to review Moderna’s pending mRNA-based flu vaccine—a decision it reversed days later, following public outcry.
Cassidy Bemoans Vaccine Research Halts
Cassidy said mRNA technology “enabled President Trump’s operation warp speed, an historic achievement, bringing a vaccine from conception to being administered within 10 or 11 months, saving millions of lives and reopening economies worldwide.” Cancelling research means “losing this critical tool and our defense against future pandemics [and putting] our national security and individual’s personal health security at risk,” he told Bhattacharya.
Added Cassidy: “I say this as a strong conservative: we need taxpayer dollars to research, to help families not to have it subject to political ideology, which masquerades as science. This includes correcting progressive Biden error actions that coerced scientists into including DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] language and thousands of NIH-funded grants, even when it had zero scientific relevance and was a waste of money and certainly did not make Americans healthier. But we can get rid of DEI without upending lifesaving research” in America.
Cassidy also told Bhattacharya that “canceling critical investments that have long enjoyed bipartisan support erodes trust and make substantive reforms less likely.”
During his opening statement, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., stated that NIH had “terminated or frozen $273 million in cancer research since Trump was inaugurated,” but overall, it had “terminated or frozen at least $561 million in research and defunded more than 300 clinical trials dealing with heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, dementia, and pediatric brain tumors.” The bulk of Sanders’ comments dealt with NIH’s failure to help reduce the cost of prescription drugs, particularly those developed with federal support.
Murray told Bhattacharya that in 2025, “one in 30 NIH-funded clinical trials were disrupted by the Trump administration’s grant terminations. It affected more than 74,000 trial participants.”
He disputed this, responding that NIH “made sure that if there was any disruption, that the researchers had resources available to make sure that the patients received continuity of care.” NIH, Bhattacharya claimed, “worked with researchers across the country to make sure that the clinical trials were really focused on advancing health and not on other political agendas and renegotiated them.” He said that the agency had “preliminary estimates” indicating that “maybe only a dozen clinical trials were terminated rather…” but was unable to finish the sentence because Murray cut him off, saying her “time is short” to ask questions.
Let me just say that the Trump administration terminated or froze 5,478 NIH grants last year. In less than six months, the Trump administration terminated 383 active NIH clinical trials that included 118 cancer clinical trials. Those patients are in a race for time,” Murray said. She challenged Bhattacharya to “guarantee to us today that NIH will not terminate grants in this wide-ranging, haphazard way again this year.”
Hassan Decries Director’s ‘Outrageous’ Response
Bhattacharya repeated that “most of those trials were restored,” to which Murray replied she was seeking a “guarantee you will not terminate any NIH grant trials this year.” Noting that “in 2020, a very large number of clinical trials were terminated during…it’s hard to predict the future,” Bhattacharya said. “But I will, what I will guarantee…that we will focus our clinical trial efforts on advancing health and not on ideological facts.”
Murray then turned to the removal of members of advisory councils, meaning awards cannot be made, and noted that, “for the first time in NIH’s 139-year history, you completely disbanded the Advisory Committee to the Director.”
Bhattacharya said he had “ordered the institutes to nominate new members. We’re working as fast as we can with dozens and dozens of new members…including for the Advisory Committee to the Director.”
Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., posed a similar set of questions, pointedly asking if NIH had “done a study to look at the impact [and] the harms that cancer patients have experienced.” Bhattacharya said NIH “funds studies; we don’t conduct directly” such studies. “Let me just say very clearly: I do not believe that patients’ care was disrupted because I ordered if there was any disruptions at all, that the patients would have continuity of care if there were disruptions.” If there were disruptions, those are “the responsibility of the researchers that were managing the patients, not the NIH,” he responded.
Replied Hassan: “That is really an unacceptable and outrageous response. You all disrupted funding.” Regardless of any “edict from Washington, D.C.,” arranging continuity of care related to a trial “can be a very complicated thing. And I know that [in] my state, there were disruptions in these studies that have really put patients at risk. And you all should be interested in that data and you should be working to find out whether it happened.”
‘No Faith at All’ in Congress
Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., told Bhattacharya he was “grateful that you took action to prevent tax dollars from being used for research that exploits the remains of aborted children,” referring to NIH’s Jan. 22 announcement that it is “ending the use of human fetal tissue from elective abortions and all taxpayer-funded research conducted or funded by NIH.”
During his remarks, Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., decried the loss of “nearly 4,000” NIH employees, of which “1,100 were doctoral level scientists.”
Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wisc., pointed out that FY 2026 funding legislation rejected OMB’s requirement that “half of all research project grants [be] multi-year funded. This would be a seismic shift with devastating consequences for research with no benefit whatsoever. Implementing this change would mean thousands fewer grants for life-saving research, fewer clinical trials to discover new treatments and cures for disease and ultimately less hope for families who are pleading with us for help.”
Although Baldwin said that, thanks to her insistence, the law prevents “the administration from implementing [OMB’s] multi-year funding scheme,” that is not the full picture. The law simply stops NIH from issuing more multi-year funding awards than it did in FY 2025. It also prohibits NIH from applying an indirect cost rate structure that differs from the practice that has been in place since 2017.
Yet, who will be watching and ensure OMB and NIH comply with the funding law requirements?
“I have no faith at all that Congress will be able to police Vought if he decides to terminate grants again or force multi-year funding or whatever scheme to gum up the awards. What power do the Democrats have? None. Unless the GOP decides to help, there will be nothing the Democrats can do,” Ginexi said.
