Republicans urge National Institutes of Health overhaul

More than four years after the Covid outbreak, the pandemic is spurring threats of major cutbacks for the chief US funder of academic science, as Republicans vent their anger over China’s role in the global contagion by attacking the budget and structure of the National Institutes of Health.

In its just-issued fiscal 2025 federal budget plan, the Republican leadership of the US House of Representatives proposes holding the NIH’s budget at $48 billion (£38 billion), despite inflation of about 3 per cent over the past year, and compressing the agency’s 27 divisions into 15.

The nation’s general fiscal condition, said Hal Rogers, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, demanded retrenchment. “We can, and must, do everything in our power to create a sustainable economic trajectory,” he said.

As for the NIH in particular, his counterpart heading the Energy and Commerce Committee, Cathy McMorris Rodgers, explained that the agency has a poor record with regard to the origins of Covid and confronting sexual abuse among researchers, and has been slow to act on her committee’s information requests.

“Historical support, for what an agency should or could be, cannot prevent us from seeking to build upon past lessons or correct areas that have fallen short,” she said in announcing the overhaul effort in the Republican-controlled half of Congress.

Academic science has traditionally fared well in the nation’s partisan battles, and the NIH – given its health-specific mission – has been especially successful. But its handling of the Covid pandemic has been a notable sore spot for Republicans, who feel the 2020 lockdowns caused domestic political and economic harm and who still harbour suspicions of China’s central role in the devastating outbreak.

Republican lawmakers have continued to heap caustic attention on Anthony Fauci – the former and long-time head of the NIH’s infectious diseases division, and presidential adviser during the height of the pandemic – berating the Georgetown University professor at another Capitol Hill hearing just this month.

Much of their criticism of Professor Fauci has centred on the NIH’s past funding of work in China on gain-of-function – the intentional strengthening of viruses to better investigate their potential threat and to explore defences against them – that many Republicans suggest as a likely cause of the Covid pandemic.

While Ms McMorris Rodgers said her proposed NIH revamp was “just the start of a robust conversation, not a finished product”, her budgetary language includes a direct prohibition on NIH involvement in gain-of-function research.

That is among the clear evidence, along with the call for a major NIH reorganisation, said Ferric Fang, a professor of microbiology at the University of Washington, that congressional Republicans – especially if they win more power in November’s election – will be coming at the agency animated more by partisanship than objective rigour.

“One can certainly discuss reorganisation of the NIH – a conversation that has been ongoing for years – but the annual budget renewal does not seem like to right time and place to mandate such a disruptive wholesale change,” Professor Fang said.

Others were less sure about motivations. Stuart Buck, the executive director of the Good Science Project, a non-profit advocate of improvements in the nation’s system of science funding, said the NIH could do with taking a hard look at its operations and assumptions – especially after one of its longest-ever leadership tenures – and that interested lawmakers should be given a chance to lay out their ideas.

“Multiple past NIH directors have said that the agency is too sprawling and unwieldy, and needs more strategic coordination,” said Mr Buck, a veteran of science philanthropy ventures. “Quite apart from any of the current debates over biosecurity, it’s worth a serious look at how to structure biomedical research in the United States.”

More generally, though, the nation’s academic medical science enterprise took a cautious approach to opining publicly on Republican intentions. The Association of American Medical Colleges said in a response to questions that it appreciates “the longstanding, bipartisan federal investment in NIH”, but did not want to discuss what kinds of political calculations, if any, might be driving the Republican reform initiative.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com