NIH grants

When a new presidential administration comes in, it is responsible for filling around 4,000 jobs sprinkled across the federal government’s vast bureaucracy. These political appointees help carry out the president’s agenda, and, at least in theory, make government agencies responsive to elected officials.

Some of these roles—the secretary of state, for example—are well-known. Others, such as the deputy assistant secretary for textiles, consumer goods, materials, critical minerals & metals industry & analysis, are more obscure.

Historically, science agencies like NASA or the National Institutes of Health tend to have fewer political appointees than many other parts of the federal government. Sometimes, very senior roles—with authority over billions of dollars of spending, and the power to shape entire fields of research—are filled without any direct input from the White House or Congress. The arrangement reflects a long-running argument that scientists should oversee the work of funding and conducting research with very little interference from political leaders.

Since the early 2000s, according to federal employment records, NIH, the country’s premier biomedical research agency, has usually had just a few political appointees within its workforce. (As of November 2025, that workforce numbered around 17,500 people, after significant cuts.) Staff scientists and external experts played a key role in selecting the directors of the 27 institutes and centers that make up NIH. That left the selection of people for powerful positions largely outside of direct White House oversight.

What is the future of that status quo under the Trump administration?

Those questions have recently swirled at NIH. The arrival of political appointees in the kinds of positions previously held by civil servants, and apparent changes to hiring practices for other key positions, have raised concerns among current and former officials about a new era of politicization.

For decades, NIH has enjoyed strong bipartisan support. But conservative lawmakers have periodically raised questions about some of the agency’s spending, and according to one 2014 survey, the agency is perceived by federal executives as being a progressive place. (Since the early 2000s, some data suggests, US scientists as a whole have grown considerably more liberal relative to the general population.)

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, many conservatives have criticized NIH for funding the kind of controversial virology experiments that some experts believe may have started the pandemic, and for promoting public health strategies that many on the right viewed as unscientific and authoritarian. One of the NIH institute directors, Anthony Fauci, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 until his retirement in 2022, came to be a highly polarizing figure, described on the right as an unelected official wielding considerable power.

Over the years, some biomedical researchers have argued for changes to the way NIH hires and retains people in leadership positions. In 2019, the agency announced plans to impose term limits on some midlevel roles, in a bid to diversify its management. More recently, Johns Hopkins University physician and researcher Joseph Marine argued in an essay for The Free Press that NIH should set five to 10-year term limits on the directors of individual NIH institutes. “Regular turnover of leadership,” he wrote, “brings fresh ideas and a healthy reassessment of priorities.”

Shortly after winning the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump tapped Jay Bhattacharya, a prominent critic of NIH, to lead the agency. It may not be entirely surprising that an administration advocating for reforms to NIH would seek to flip key management positions that often experience little turnover.

Former official Mike Lauer, who until early 2025 oversaw NIH’s vast external grants program, said there were signs before Trump’s second inauguration that institute directors might be subject to fresh political scrutiny.

“There was a frustration that so much of the agency’s direction, as well as financial decision-making, was being made by people who are outside of the political sphere,” Lauer told Undark. He pointed to a line in Project 2025, a proposed roadmap for the Trump administration that was produced by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “Funding for scientific research,” the report argues, “should not be controlled by a small group of highly paid and unaccountable insiders at the NIH, many of whom stay in power for decades.”

Soon after Trump’s inauguration, some senior officials at NIH were put on administrative leave or abruptly departed, including Lawrence Tabak, who had spent more than a decade as principal deputy director and served as NIH’s interim leader for almost two years during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At the same time, the administration grew the number of political appointees at NIH. As of late June, according to federal records, the Trump administration had placed nine political appointees at the agency, up from four the year before—itself higher than in most previous years. One of them, Seana Cranston, is a former Republican Congressional staffer who serves as chief of staff to the NIH Director; her predecessor was a career civil servant who had spent nearly 40 years in the NIH, the last four as chief of staff. Another is Michael Allen, who took the role of chief operating officer for the $6.5 billion NIAID, Fauci’s former institute. (Allen was appointed with no official announcement, and appears to have no official biography or background information posted on NIH websites.)

Those numbers still left NIH with fewer political appointees than many other agencies, including NASA, a comparably sized science agency.

The administration has departed from the traditional process for hiring NIH’s 27 institute and center directors, who are responsible for overseeing most of the funding decisions and day-to-day operations of NIH.

In the spring of 2025, five of those directors—including the head of NIAID—were fired or placed on administrative leave. (They have all since been removed from their positions.)

Then, in September, part of the search committee for the National Institute of Mental Health was abruptly disbanded, and then just as suddenly reconvened, according to Joshua Gordon, the former head of that institute, and one other source close to NIH.

In October, the directorship of another agency, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, was filled by a close personal friend of Vice President JD Vance, without any apparent search process — a move that multiple former NIH officials told Undark may be unprecedented.

By then, 13 other NIH institutes and centers had vacant leadership posts. Other roles have opened up more recently: In an email to NIH staff on Dec. 30, Bhattacharya announced the departure of Walter Koroshetz, leader of the agency’s main neuroscience research institute. In the email, Bhattacharya seemed to suggest he had opposed the decision: “Dr. Koroshetz’s performance as Director has been exceptional,” Bhattacharya wrote, but “the Department of Health and Human Services has elected to pursue a leadership transition.”

In early January, the Director of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute announced his retirement, bringing the total number of open posts to 15.

The searches, NIH insiders say, appear to be happening on a compressed timeline. And while the NIH director has typically relied on search committees consisting of both NIH career scientists and external experts, multiple sources close to NIH say the agency has not formed those kinds of committees to make the latest round of hires.

In response to questions from Undark in early January, the Department of Health and Human Services sent a brief emailed statement, signed “NIH Press Team,” explaining that “an NIH leadership team with experience in scientific agency management will consider the applicant pool and make recommendations to the NIH Director.” The press representative declined to respond to follow-up questions about who would be on that team, or why the hiring process had changed.

Those changes have prompted speculation among some NIH insiders that the Trump administration is seeking to exert more political control over the hiring of directorships.

“Having external members on the search committee is vitally important for preventing politicization,” said Mark Histed, an NIH scientist who has recently been a critic — on his personal time, he stresses — of Trump’s approach to the agency. “Because, as you can imagine, if you’ve got a bunch of external scientists, it’s a lot harder to ram down what the White House wants, because people are not part of the political system.”

That kind of open and non-politicized search process, Histed said in a follow-up interview, isn’t unique to NIH: It’s one widely used by scientific institutions around the world. And it has worked, he argued, to help make NIH a scientific juggernaut: “That process,” he said, “led to 80 years of staggering scientific success.”

Members of Congress have taken notice. In language attached to the current appropriations bill moving through Congress, lawmakers direct NIH “to maintain its longstanding practice of including external scientists and stakeholders” in the search process. (Agencies are supposed to follow these Congressional instructions, but they are not binding.) In late January, Diana DeGette, a Democratic representative from Colorado, sponsored a bill that, according to a press release, would “Protect NIH From Political Interference” by, among other steps, capping the number of political appointees at the agency.

Lauer, the former NIH grants chief, took a broader historical view of the changes. There has long been a tug-of-war, he said, between presidential administrations that seek more political control over an agency, and civil servants and other bureaucratic experts who may resist that perceived incursion. From the point of view of politicians and their staff, Lauer said, “what they’ll say—I understand where they’re coming from—what they’ll say is, is that more political control means that the agency is going to be responsive to the will of the electorate, that there’s a greater degree of transparency and public accountability.”

Those upsides can be significant, Lauer said, but there are also downsides, including more short-term thinking, unstable budgets, and the potential loss of expertise and competence.

Mark Richardson, a political scientist at Georgetown University, is an expert on politicization and the federal bureaucracy. In his work, he said, he has observed a correlation between how much political parties disagree over the role of a specific agency, and the degree to which presidential administrations seek to exert control there through appointees and other personnel choices. NIH has historically fallen alongside agencies like the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that are subject to broad alignment across the parties.

“I think what you’re seeing more with the Trump administration is kind of an expansion of political conflict to these types of agencies,” Richardson said.

This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.