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INSIDE THE BLOODBATH AT THE NIH  
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Gregg Gonsalves
May 8, 2025
The Nation
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_ Sources say that a climate of fear has spread throughout the agency
as the Trump administration takes a hatchet to its core functions. _

Donald Trump, accompanied by National Institutes of Health Director
Jayanta Bhattacharya (L), and Health and Human Services Secretary
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (R), speaks in the Oval Office at the White
House on May 5, 2025., Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

 

In 2019, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a drug
[[link removed]] with
the trade name of Trikafta for the treatment of cystic fibrosis (CF)
in children over 12, who harbored the most common genetic mutation
associated with the disease.

The National Institutes of Health played a central role in 
[[link removed]]Trikafta’s discovery
and development [[link removed]]. None
other than former NIH director Francis Collins was one of the leaders
of the team that discovered the gene responsible for CF
[[link removed]] when
he was a young NIH-funded investigator at the University of Michigan
in 1989. Work then followed with the support of the NIH, the Cystic
Fibrosis Foundation, and the drug company Vertex to take those
insights and drive the development of new therapies for CF.

This is, ideally, how American biomedical research is supposed to
work—carefully, constructively, and with the public and private
sectors both playing their part. And the NIH is crucial to that
process.

Over the next six years, the FDA allowed
[[link removed](CFTR)%20gene.] children
older than 2 to take Trikafta and included a wider range of genetic
mutations on the label, making the drug available to tens of thousands
of patients with CF, many of them young children, and transforming
their lives and the lives of their families. What once was a fatal
disease, striking down most patients by their 20s, became manageable
for many, vastly increasing the survival of people living with CF.

One of those people was the daughter of a young, devoutly Christian
couple named Russell and Mary Vought. In 2021, the Voughts were able
to get their daughter on Trifakta. As Julia Metraux reported in an
article for _Mother Jones_
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early February, Mary Vought was elated: “Today our little one starts
#trikafta. Beyond grateful for this miracle drug.… We’re extremely
grateful to live in a nation that leads the way on medical
innovation.”

But if the Voughts could once be described as symbols of the good that
government can do for public health, Russell Vought has now become a
symbol of just the opposite.

Metraux told the story about the Voughts because Russell had just been
appointed as the director of the Office of Management and Budget, and
one of his first priorities was to attempt to gut indirect funding for
research institutions from the NIH—the same kind of funding that
produced the drug helping Vought’s own child. The Cystic Fibrosis
Foundation responded with criticism
[[link removed]],
stating that discoveries like that of Trikafta depend on this critical
infrastructure support, support that Mr. Vought was now putting in
jeopardy.

Just a little over 100 days later, it is clear that Russell Vought was
just getting started on dismantling biomedical research in the United
States. The NIH, when Vought gets through with it, will be a shell of
its former self
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It’s clear that for the Voughts, gratitude or even any sense of
Christian charity is trumped by political sadism. “We want the
bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said
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private talks, recorded on video in 2023 and 2024, and uncovered
by _ProPublica_ and _Documented_
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“When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to
work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want
their funding to be shut down.… We want to put them in trauma.”

Vought outlined his plans in Project 2025
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behind many of the savage attacks on the public sector in the US,
including the NIH. But who are his foot soldiers? Who is doing the
dirty business at the agency level? While Elon Musk and Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. are the chaos agents in chief, useful idiots for
turbo-charging Vought’s vision, who is inside a place like the NIH,
who is doing the day-to-day work in the destruction of our nation’s
biomedical research infrastructure? To put it bluntly, who is
responsible?

Two days after Trump’s second inauguration, Matthew Memoli was
appointed
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NIH director. Dr. Memoli had been the director
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Infectious Diseases Clinical Studies Unit at the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). But it wasn’t his
scientific, clinical, or administrative expertise that most likely won
him this critical post of leading all of the NIH’s institutes and
centers. Since 2021, Memoli had been a vociferous critic of Covid
vaccination mandates at the agency, bringing him into conflict with
the NIAID’s then-director, Anthony Fauci, and his opposition to
Fauci
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to be the calling card he needed for the Trump team.

According to multiple sources with direct knowledge of what’s going
on inside the NIH, all of whom were given anonymity to protect them
from retribution, acting director Memoli arrived at his job already
joined at the hip to a new political appointee, James McElroy. McElroy
has now been appointed deputy chief of staff to the NIH director, even
though positions like this are usually filled by career civil
servants.

It is difficult to find anything about McElroy in the public domain,
but my sources suggested to me that he is associated with Musk’s
DOGE wrecking crew. In addition, Max Kozlov, a reporter at the science
journal _Nature_, wrote that McElroy quickly met with many of the
NIH’s directors and clashed with some
[[link removed]].

If DOGE needed a guide to the inner workings of the agency, Memoli
would have the knowledge to provide. And it is Memoli who pulled the
trigger on the cuts to indirect costs, the pausing of grants, their
terminations, the decision to slow-walk study sections and council
meetings, and the purging of senior staff at the agency, from
second-in-command Larry Tabak to numerous institute directors.

Memoli is now the principal deputy director at the NIH (fellow Covid
skeptic Jay Bhattacharya has taken the top job), but he seems to still
be leading the MAGA charge. Recently, _Stat News_ revealed a leaked
e-mail
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which Memoli launched into an unhinged rant on international research:

I don’t know how to make this clearer. Subawards to foreign sites
can’t continue. This has been horribly mismanaged for years, and it
has been completely irresponsible. We must take immediate action. If a
study has a foreign site, we need to start closing it down…

First, anyone who has had a foreign subcontract from the NIH knows
they are heavily scrutinized, both by the NIH and by our own
universities—the charges of gross mismanagement and irresponsibility
aren’t altogether credible, particularly coming from someone who has
had no relevant experience with extramural research, that is, studies
outside of the NIH. Second, even if reforms are needed, the immediate
shutdown of international research is, well, irresponsible, as it
destroys billions of dollars in ongoing work, which will be difficult
or impossible to restart down the line in many cases.

Meanwhile, as Memoli is freezing all international research and
billions of dollars of other NIH funding is being held up or
withdrawn, two people are cashing in on the field’s misfortune.
Memoli and the new acting director of the NIAID, Jeffery K.
Taubenberger, just got a windfall from RFK Jr. of, wait for it, $500
million
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for their project to develop universal Covid-19 and influenza
vaccines, bypassing the standard review of the merits of the work. In
fact, serious questions are being raised about the viability of the
approach—using whole, killed pathogens for vaccines as they did
decades ago for polio—from colleagues in the field. As one
scientist said to _Stat News_
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efforts in the field towards universal vaccines and this new award to
Memoli, “There is incredible work going on. This is not it.”

And there is another new sheriff in town. Eric Schnabel, who
previously served in a leadership role in the health and fitness
industry
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has been recently appointed chief operating officer of the NIH
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Again, it is not his substantive expertise that is relevant here: He
has no experience with biomedical research or management of
multibillion-dollar companies or institutions. In a brief news report
on his appointment, Schnabel’s portfolio was said to be focused on
“upgrading security measures, increasing operational efficiency and
improving employee communication.” Schnabel intends to run a tight
ship, as he explained in a recent e-mail I received, which has been
leaked elsewhere
[[link removed]]:

Over the past month, I have observed firsthand the extraordinary work
being done at the NIH. I’ve seen true patriots applying their
intellect and passion to serve the American people. However, I have
also witnessed concerning behavior that must be addressed. Some
examples include:
       Damage to government property
       Operations lacking proper accountability
       Failure to maintain clean and orderly workspaces
       Complacent behavior
       Instances of malicious compliance

To clarify, the definition of malicious compliance is when individuals
deliberately follow instructions or rules in a way that they know will
cause problems or inefficiencies—often to highlight flaws or out of
protest. This behavior, while subtle, is detrimental to our mission
and culture.

Let me be clear: We will not tolerate unprofessional conduct. These
behaviors will be addressed fairly and swiftly. We are all accountable
for creating and maintaining a safe, disciplined, and professional
work environment—one where excellence is expected and where every
team member can thrive. If you need additional purpose, direction, and
motivation; please go and visit the children’s ward in Building 10
or the Children’s Inn. There you will find all the reason / strength
that you need to continue mission.

The message _is_ clear. Anyone who stays at the agency, or has yet
to be fired, needs to get with the program; do not highlight flaws,
attempt to protest, however subtly. Does all this sound threatening?
Well, it probably was meant to be. Those I spoke to at the NIH
reported a climate of fear, of people “obeying in advance,” rather
than pushing back, and those who remain in Bethesda being uncertain
about how to work in such an environment without surrendering the core
values that drove them to public service in the first place.

Which leaves the new NIH director himself, Jay Bhattacharya. A critic
of the NIH and a noted Covid contrarian
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Dr. Bhattacharya, a health economist, said he was coming to the NIH to
bring more openness and risk-taking in research, to pursue replication
of research results to build a more robust evidence base for medical
interventions—all terribly wholesome proposals. His biggest
champions, Steven Macedo and Frances Lee from Princeton, heralded his
appointment
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representing “a strong dose of fresh thinking and institutional
reform from experts prepared to challenge the reigning consensus and
renew our commitment to the basic values of science and liberalism.”

Yet Bhattacharya’s anger
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his ideas about how to handle the Covid pandemic have lingered with
him for years now and seem to be a motivating force in his life. The
day before Bhattacharya assumed office, Anthony Fauci’s wife, the
bioethicist Christine Grady, and one of Fauci’s long time deputies,
Cliff Lane, were fired
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welcoming gift from RFK Jr. and a taunt of their common foe. The same
day, Fauci’s replacement at NIAID, director Jeanne Marrazzo, was
also put on administrative leave, and given the choice to take a
position with the Indian Health Service or depart from federal service
altogether, while the NIAID’s microbiology and infectious diseases
director, Emily Erbelding, was let go. Clearly, it’s not an
auspicious start to the promised bright new era for biomedicine in the
US that Macedo and Lee said was in store for us.

Yet, over a month into his tenure, Bhattacharya hasn’t complained or
pushed back against what is happening at the NIH. In fact, he seems
happy and at home after the institutes’ Red Wedding and its
continuing aftermath: hundreds of fired employees; hundreds of grants
terminated and hundreds more in limbo falling afoul of a list of
trigger words
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conservatives; thousands of careers around the US and the world up in
smoke; a lost generation of biomedical research in this country; and,
most tragically, the cures now delayed or forever deferred.

As a former NIH-funded researcher himself, one could have envisioned
him as the hero of this tale—fighting back and creating a better NIH
for our times. I held out that hope for a week or so myself, thinking
he must surely see and know what is going on and would soon call a
stop to it. Yet now here he sits among the rubble, surveying his
kingdom of dust, and one can’t help but think he’s gotten what he
wanted all along. The rest of us will have to live—and yes, die and
suffer—with his legacy and the legacy of these men who would destroy
the NIH.

_Gregg Gonsalves
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correspondent for The Nation. Gregg is the codirector of the Global
Health Justice Partnership and an associate professor of epidemiology
at the Yale School of Public Health._

_Copyright c 2024 THE NATION. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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* NIH
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* Robert F. Kennedy Jr
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* Jayanta Bhattacharya
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* Donald Trump
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* Healthcare
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* Health Policy
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* government funding
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* research
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* Project 2025
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