NIH Modernization Hearing Highlights Issues of Concern

By: Ellen Kuo
Thursday, February 12, 2026
The Senate Health, Education, and Pensions Committee held a hearing with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, as the only witness on February 3. Chairman Bill Cassidy, a physician, opened the hearing, stressing the need to help patients in need of treatments who are dying because there is none, and recognizing NIH’s funding of more than 50,000 biomedical research projects a year, more than any other institution in the world. By his calculations, every ten years NIH sees some reform, as it did in 2016 under the 21st Century Cures Act.

Issues that arose during the hearing covered a range of topics: vaccines and their link to autism, fetal tissue and embryonic stem cells, cuts to mNRA funding, multiyear funding, facilities and administration costs, the impact on participants involved in abruptly terminated clinical trials, advisory councils without a full complement of members, the status of long COVID research, filling institute and center director positions at NIH, slowed grant reviews, grant terminations for political reasons, gain of function research, reproducibility, the reduction in vaccines in the child and adolescent vaccine schedule, and need for price reduction of drugs in the United States that have their roots in NIH research.

During the hearing, Dr. Bhattacharya was asked several times about whether there is a link between vaccines and autism and whether the director had spoken to Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy about vaccines and autism. After the NIH Director stated he had, Chairman Cassidy wanted to know whether Kennedy had changed his mind that there was a linkage. Cassidy answered his own question that he had not. However, Dr. Bhattacharya did say there was no linkage between the measles vaccine and autism. When ranking member Bernie Sanders wanted to know if there was any linkage between vaccines in general and autism, the director said he had not seen a study that suggests any single vaccine causes autism. 

On the issue of multiyear funding, Senator Tammy Baldwin wanted to understand how increasing the use of multiyear funding was anything but a setback for NIH research, and to know how many fewer grants NIH funded due to this policy in FY 2025. She said 2,000, but Dr. Bhattacharya said that it was not necessarily due to the policy. She was also concerned about the fact that NIH has gone from two political appointees to ten under his leadership, who replaced civil servants with decades of experience.

The NIH Director also testified that “there were no cuts to NIH grant funding, but there were disruptions last year in some clinical trials.” The director said about a dozen clinical trials were disrupted, and any that were disrupted were renegotiated to focus on science and not the political aspect of the research.

Senator Jim Banks focused on the fact that six states receive nearly half of all NIH funding, and the bottom 30 states only obtain 13 percent. Banks wanted to hear how Dr. Bhattacharya was dealing with the increasing distribution of funding, since there are good ideas everywhere, which the director agreed with. The director said NIH has changed the way the institutes select projects so there is more geographic diversity, and he wanted to work with Congress to introduce a market for facilities support. Currently, great researchers go to places with great facilities, and NIH therefore funds these great researchers, who can win more NIH money, which further enhances their great facilities. Breaking this circular loop is key, according to Dr. Bhattacharya.

An archived video of the hearing and Dr. Bhattacharya’s testimony is available on the committee’s website.