Acting Infectious Disease Director Departs Before Senate Hearing

The top scientist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases departed his post ahead of a congressional hearing Thursday on the National Institutes of Health’s budget.

Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) said NIAID’s acting director, Jeffery Taubenberger, had been slated to testify alongside other institute directors and NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya before he stepped down.

“We have a leadership vacuum at the world’s premier infectious disease institute and across our health agencies,” said Baldwin, the Senate Appropriations Labor-HHS-Education subcommittee’s top Democrat. “Other officials at NIAID have also reportedly been reassigned and forced out of their positions in the midst of an emergency Ebola outbreak.”

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the top Democrat of the full committee, said she’d been told that eight of the top officials atop NIAID are no longer in their roles.

The departure is the latest under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and adds to a vacuum of leadership at health agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. The US is also grappling with a response to the Ebola outbreak in central Africa.

Bhattacharya said the institute is undergoing changes to its focus and that new leadership was a necessary part of this.

“We have shifted the focus of NIAID to address diseases and conditions that people actually have, including the hantavirus, including Ebola, and so much else,” said Bhattacharya. “That shift means that we need some new leadership. The folks you are talking about are still at the NIH but they’ve been assigned to places where they can help with the changed missions of the NIAID to focus on infectious diseases and on allergy and immunology.”

The Department of Health and Human Services didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on the staffing change.

Agency Funding

The White House budget requested $41.5 billion for NIH for fiscal year 2027, or $5 billion less than it received this year. Bhattacharya’s appearance before the Senate panel comes as Congress crafts its budget proposals for the HHS.

Thursday’s hearing is the first time individual institute directors have appeared before Congress during this administration. Bhattacharya appeared alone to testify on the NIH budget last year and again in March during an agency oversight hearing.

Also appearing Thursday were National Institute on Aging Director Richard Hodes; National Cancer Institute Director Anthony Letai; National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases Director Griffin Rodgers; National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences Director Joni Rutter; and National Institute on Drug Abuse Director Nora Volkow.

Congress is unlikely to lower funding for the NIH, which has received bipartisan support, but scientists worry that continued delays to how and when research grants are awarded will impact the stability of the workforce and impact future discoveries.

Grant Delays

The number of grants awarded to NIH institutes remains behind its pace of previous years.

Bhattacharya sought to assuage concerns about that pace and the effectiveness of his agency’s distribution of new research grants.

The institutes furthest behind this year in distributing money are the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, and the National Cancer Institute, according to NIH RePORTER analysis of data as of May 12.

The NIMHD, which was proposed to be eliminated under the White House budget request, is the furthest behind in both the number of awards granted and the total value of money distributed compared to the average during the same time in 2021-2024.

Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) said Hawaii has been waiting on updates for six months on a $100 million AI and cancer research workforce grant that has been in administrative review, and sought a commitment that NIH plans to staff up its Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Health Research Office.

“The NIMHD has absolutely committed to spending the allocation of funding that Congress has given this year as we did last year and to spend it on excellent science,” said Bhattacharya, who said he has “full confidence that they will be able to identify great research that improves the health and well being of minority populations in this country.”