National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Monica Bertagnoli will step down on January 17, telling staff this week that she will end her tenure as head of the $48 billion biomedical research agency in just one year.
“I am extremely proud of what the NIH has accomplished in such a short period of time under my leadership,” Bertagnoli said. in her presentationHe touted the list of initiatives that had been started and said he hoped the next administration would continue them.
The NIH is an agency that typically enjoys bipartisan support, and Bertagnoli's predecessor, Francis Collins, served in three administrations over more than 12 years. But lingering Republican anger over the response to the COVID-19 pandemic has put the NIH squarely in the crosshairs of partisans.
The agency has come under intense criticism, particularly targeting leaders like Collins and Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for 38 years.
Bertagnoli has spent much of the past year trying to drum up support from lawmakers in both the House and Senate who want to make dramatic changes, including shrinking the agency from 27 independent institutes and centers to 15.
Other proposals include increasing term limits for institute directors to a maximum of two terms, adding new oversight measures for grant recipients, and placing new limits on research grants that pose national security risks. It included adding.
President-elect Trump has nominated his NIH director, Stanford University health economist Jay Bhattacharyya, to potentially lead some of the massive restructuring efforts that Bertagnoli worked to block.
Bhattacharyya was one of the authors of an open letter called the Great Barrington Declaration that criticized COVID-19 mandates and called for “herd immunity.”
President Trump's health team also includes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as a candidate to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, the NIH's parent agency.
Although President Kennedy is a vaccine skeptic and questions the safety of fluoridated water, he supports a focus on chronic disease as part of his policy to “make America healthy again,” and he is a leader at the NIH. is calling for a temporary moratorium on infectious disease research.
President Kennedy has also called for hundreds of NIH employees to be fired, which would be difficult without Congressional action.
