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Lysenkoism 2.0 continues: Podcast Jay wants to turn NIH into the “research arm” of MAHA
NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya has recently said that he wants to transform the NIH into the "research arm of MAHA" and a "central driver of the MAHA agenda." Lysenkoism 2.0 continues apace at NIH.
The post Lysenkoism 2.0 continues: Podcast Jay wants to turn NIH into the “research arm” of MAHA first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.
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One aspect of the Trump administration’s war on science and expertise that has not given nearly the attention that it deserves by the mainstream press is the current carnage at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) under the “leadership” of its current director, Dr. Jayanta Bhattacharya. While the mainstream press is filled with stories—and rightly so!—about what the longtime antivax activist who is now Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has done thus far to dismantle the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) as a reliable federal resource for public health, eliminating as many vaccines as he can from the US schedule as fast as he can (as if he senses that he has less than three years to eliminate all vaccines in the US), and working on turning the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) into yet another arm of his antivax quackery-fueled “make America healthy again” (MAHA) movement, the dismantling of the NIH and, with it, likely the dominance in biomedical research that the US has enjoyed for decades gets a lot less attention. Worse, when it does get attention, there’s an unfortunately good chance that it will be in the form of a fawning interview in the New York Times by a hack pundit like Ross Douthat about “restoring trust” in science, which is—among other things—what prodded me last week to get off my duff and write a post that I’ve been meaning to write for weeks now about how Dr. Bhattacharya is serving as the useful idiot and figurehead under which the NIH is being transformed into the “research arm” of MAHA. If that’s not Lysenkoism 2.0 (as I’ve been calling it), I don’t know what is.
Taken in context, the MAHA takeover of the NIH under the figurehead “direction” of Dr. Bhattacharya is, as I’ve written before, an extinction-level threat to public health and biomedical research in this country. Quite frankly, it could well mean the end of the relatively apolitical—or at least nonpartisan—research agenda of the NIH for a generation, with the NIH being turned into yet another patronage system under a profoundly transactional President.
Before I get to discussing in depth how Dr. Bhattacharya’s puppetmasters are bringing back the ghost of Trofim Lysenko, let’s look at a little backdrop. What has the administration been doing to the NIH over the last year?
Hollowing out federal scientific expertise
Before a discussion of what Dr. Bhattacharya claims and says, it’s useful to compare whatever he says to an actual analysis published in Science a week ago, US government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office:
Some 10,109 doctoral-trained experts in science and related fields left their jobs last year as President Donald Trump dramatically shrank the overall federal workforce. That exodus was only 3% of the 335,192 federal workers who exited last year but represents 14% of the total number of Ph.D.s in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) or health fields employed at the end of 2024 as then-President Joe Biden prepared to leave office.
The numbers come from employment data posted earlier this month by the White House Office of Personnel Management (OPM). At 14 research agencies Science examined in detail, departures outnumbered new hires last year by a ratio of 11 to one, resulting in a net loss of 4224 STEM Ph.D.s. The graphs that follow show the impact is particularly striking at such scientist-rich agencies as the National Science Foundation (NSF). But across the government, these departing Ph.D.s took with them a wealth of subject matter expertise and knowledge about how the agencies operate.
This is a dramatic brain drain, as well as loss of institutional memory and expertise. As PZ Myers put it, “They aren’t coming back, you know.” He’s right, too:
Perhaps you would like me to reassure you that once we throw the rascals out and elect responsible politicians who respect the role science has played in American prosperity, we’ll just hire them back. No, sorry, this isn’t like rehiring workers at the Amazon warehouse. A science hire is accompanied by a large investment in equipment and personnel.
Correct. Let’s assume a best-case scenario for US federal support of science, one in which a science-loving Democratic candidate elected on a promise to rebuild HHS agencies is elected in 2028. By January 20, 2029, when that candidate will take office, the vast majority of the scientists who have been forced out will have either found other jobs in industry (or, less likely, academia), left the US to find work elsewhere, or been forced to change their careers. The “just hire them back” attitude shows a profound lack of understanding of how scientific programs are built. Here’s a graphical representation of the carnage in terms of overall staffing at key federal scientific agencies, many at HHS:
[Line graph showing percentage change in staff levels from 2016 to 2024 for nine U.S. agencies. Most agencies show a staff increase around 2020, followed by a sharp decline, especially in 2024.]
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