The Trump NIH has a new 'free speech' policy. But the right supports free speech only when it benefits the right

Today we received an article from Inside Health Policy, a pharma-focused publication about NIH and other government health policy issues. The article is behind a paywall, but it has a lot of excellent passages, so we asked the sender to excerpt it. It’s about the essential issue of free speech and how it might be used or abused at NIH.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has begun rolling out a new disclaimer requirement for all publications by intramural researchers.

…

The policy aims to assert a firewall between researchers’ conclusions and official government positions, echoing Bhattacharya’s repeated public commitments to fostering “viewpoint diversity” at the agency. NIH told staff more components of the academic freedom framework will be announced in the coming weeks.

— Inside Health Policy • July 23, 2025 • Maaisha Osman (mosman@iwpnews.com)

That’s fine. Academic and scientific freedom are important principles. Free speech is an important principle. Scientists, including federal scientists, must be able to speak freely about the work they have done, and also direct their science projects, following up leads where they find them, and be able to follow the data.

So far, so good.

So why are people skeptical of the Trump NIH director, Jay Bhattacharya, and what he’s doing here? Because he has spent the last five years leveraging free speech principles to boost his own ability to tell medical lies — to deceive the public about COVID in ways that benefit Republicans and the powerful.

Bhattacharya did such a good job weaponizing free speech principles to spread junk science that a notorious right-wing foundation, the Bradley Foundation, gave him a $250,000 prize for his “I’ve been censored!1!” claims. Bradley is behind a raft of anti-science and pro-Trump policies, and it supported the Big Lie, as well as the COVID misinformation from Bhattacharya.

How has Bhattacharya abused free speech? “Free speech” seems unobjectionable, right? Well, yes. Except that it can be enforced selectively. Bhattacharya’s trick, one well-known by all the billionaires that have supported him over the years, is to ask for freedom of speech for speech he likes, while ignoring free speech principles when others are persecuted for speech he doesn’t like.

DEIA principles are a good example. As the article says:

“What the right has realized is that they can weaponize free speech,” the [NIH] employee said. “Jay Bhattacharya is not saying that free speech should apply to people that are … speaking out about diversity.”

The employee pointed to recent actions taken by NIH leadership — including the dismissal of Board of Scientific Counselors reviewers who had diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) statements on their institutional websites — as evidence of hypocrisy in the agency’s evolving stance on academic expression.

“[DEI statements on their websites are] the definition of free speech,” the employee added. “Are those people protected? Is anyone screaming about censorship in their case? No. Because their speech [on DEI] doesn't align with the [Trump] political agenda.”

Exactly. And this doesn’t even get to the way the Trump administration and Bhattacharya have weaponized the grant system to punish schools like Harvard, Columbia, and Penn for speech. Stripping grant money from Penn until it “must announce” things? Compelling speech that the Trump administration likes, and making unrelated science money contingent on that? That is totally fine with Bhattacharya.

Let’s wait for him to go on Bari Weiss’ podcast again and spend substantial time condemning Trump for this violation of free speech, and the Trump censorship of the swimmer’s speech about her gender identity. We will be waiting a long time.

“Free speech for me, while I ignore free speech for thee.” That’s the hypocrisy behind the Trump NIH Director, and the right-wing anti-science movement that he now sits at the front of. Let’s pay attention to what kind of speech he wants to protect.

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