Jay Bhattacharya keeps falsely claiming that he can't terminate ideologically-driven grants at NIH

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds a large number of ideologically-driven, scientifically invalid grants, e.g. one that looks at the role of “microaggressions” in driving black people to smoke more marijuana and a new grant for a “misinformation” researcher who treated COVID lab origin as misinformation, as well as the statement “Democrats are using the coronavirus situation to harm President Trump.”

This year, I was a senior advisor to NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, tasked with building a framework to eliminate all this ideologically-driven junk science from the NIH portfolio. Unfortunately, Jay mysteriously ghosted me from Day 1, wouldn’t respond to my messages or any grant examples, and deleted the framework summary I sent him. I have no explanation or theory for his behavior, and the result is that NIH will not be adopting a framework to eliminate ideology from scientific research, and without such a framework they won’t be able to identify ideologically-compromised grants or defend their decisions in court.

In response to my Daily Caller article about my experience at NIH, NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya and his deputy Matthew Memoli published this article in the Spectator, touting how they “cured DEI at the National Institutes of Health”.

They claim that activist courts are blocking them from terminating “DEI-focused” grants, repeating the false claim that Jay first made when he responded to my article on X.

The court injunction he referred to is from Thakur v. Trump. The judge did not block NIH from terminating bogus grants. Her ruling applies only to grants “terminated by means of a form termination notice that does not provide a grant-specific explanation for the termination”.

That’s it. That’s the impediment. Obviously, NIH can provide specific reasons for all its terminations. For example, for the “microaggressions” and marijuana grant, NIH could say something like:

“Microaggression” is a proprietary leftist construct that asserts that mundane speech like a white person denying that he’s racist is a “microaggression”. Thus “microaggressions” don’t exist except in the minds of leftists who construe them into being. Such ideological constructs cannot be the basis of a valid scientific study.

Done.

A rigorous and neutral Clean Science framework would make it easier to identify and articulate the specific issues with bogus grants. For example, it would explicitly cover the phenomenon of embedding ideology into grants, like “microaggressions” in the above case. It would feature a clean, neutral definition of ideology, such as “any construct that represents a purported injustice or oppression”, especially if the purported oppression is contested.

Jay has repeatedly claimed that he can’t do anything because of the courts, but that’s just false — open the injunction and see for yourself. From his behavior, we can infer that he doesn’t want to eliminate (leftist) ideology at NIH. It’s also possible that he believed false claims from NIH staff regarding the court injunctions, but that wouldn’t explain his incredible ghosting behavior while I was at NIH.

In his Spectator op-ed, Jay framed the issue as being about “DEI-focused grants”. This mirrors the boilerplate in the grant terminations and the Priorities Directive that Memoli issued in February as Acting NIH Director.

Two problems:

1. Not all of the ideologically compromised research is based on DEI ideology — e.g. the Orwellian “misinformation” work has nothing to do with DEI. Leftist ideology is much bigger than DEI.

2. NIH and the Trump administration more broadly made the false claim that “DEI studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics”, which blew up in court1.

What’s happened is that instead of squarely and systematically addressing the way in which leftists have undermined science at NIH, NSF, and academia, the administration locked onto DEI only, which is too narrow. In so doing, they ultimately overloaded the term and are calling everything “DEI”, which is undermining them/us in court. (Not just one court, but several.)

Two months before the false claim that “DEI studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race and other protected characteristics” was exposed in the Federal District of Massachusetts, I deleted it from the NIH Priorities Directive.

This was in April, weeks before I started at NIH. Jay sent me the directive and asked me for help revising it. I noticed the false claim right away and cut it, among many other edits and revisions. But Jay didn’t swap in my fixed version of the Directive, so in June NIH was needlessly embarrassed in court because the old February Directive with the false claim was still in force.

If it’s not clear, the claim is false because the relevant NIH studies are not generally used to support unlawful discrimination. For example, studying whether “microaggressions” drive black people to smoke more marijuana doesn’t support unlawful discrimination.

Same with the “anti-racist” grant at San Francisco State that takes minority teens to parks in a deranged bid to reduce their telomere erosion (the redundant DNA sequences that erode as we age). You could argue that the study discriminates against whites by not including them in their samples, but it’s not illegal to research specific racial-ethnic groups.

The problem isn’t legality — it’s scientific invalidity and ideological bias. NIH is supposed to be a scientific organization, not a political one. Studies based on proprietary leftist constructs and dogma like “microaggressions” and the new “anti-racist” ideology (which looks extremely racist and rests on false empirical claims) are not scientifically valid.

It’s also a problem that taxpayers are forced to fund partisan ideological research, especially ideologies like leftism that do not enjoy majority support. This is wildly inappropriate (and should be illegal). This is another argument that NIH, NSF, and other agencies could add to their quiver.

NIH, NSF, and serious universities need a smart, rigorous Clean Science framework that defines and detects all ideology. A narrow DEI focus, like DOGE had, will miss most of the bogus grants (and they indeed did miss most of them).

Just saying “DEI, DEI, DEI” isn’t good enough and has already led to some avoidable court losses. I’m not sure that NIH leadership understands the extent and nature of the ideological bias at work. We’re a year in, and we’re still funding tons of ridiculous grants that should’ve been cancelled. In so doing, we’re richly subsidizing leftist activists who cosplay as scientists and who despise the taxpayers showering them with money. It’s a ridiculous, insulting, and unjust situation and needs swift and permanent resolution.

I’ve repeatedly mentioned the need for a framework to eliminate ideology in scientific research. Here’s part of the Clean Science framework I built. I identified four areas of bias so far:

1. Inherently ideological research, e.g. research based on proprietary and often Orwellian leftist constructs like “microaggressions” and “systemic racism”. Such research is scientifically invalid since these constructs aren’t consensual, objective descriptions of reality.

2. Rigged research. Misinformation and vaccine hesitancy are not inherently leftist constructs and can be defined in neutral, descriptive terms. They might even be worthy of research attention, but in practice this research is always rigged to advance leftist narratives.

   Academic “misinformation researchers” invariably treat facts, unsettled claims, and matters of opinion as “misinformation”, and they’re always beliefs associated with conservatives – leftist misinformation is completely ignored (e.g. the COVID shots prevent infection, sterilizing children (puberty blockers + cross-sex hormones) prevents suicides, community mask use (even cloth) definitely reduces COVID spread, Trump suggested that people inject or drink bleach).

   For example, NIH funded a misinformation study that treated statements like “Coronavirus is genetically engineered” and “Democrats are using the coronavirus situation to harm President Trump” as misinfo. In fact, this is the same researcher (Sean Young at UC Irvine) I cite in my Daily Caller article for conducting the study of the harms of one of President Trump’s optimistic tweets, and who just got another $651,586 from NIH for more “misinformation” research.

3. Suppression of research and data that conflict with leftist ideology. The principal example is denial of race as a health factor and ideological efforts to erase everything we know about race and health. This is driven by the new leftist race ideology that cannot accept race differences on any dimension (even mundane medical realities), unless they’re derogatory claims about white people. Leftists are fully willing to endanger patients by ignoring scientific evidence about race and health.

4. Missing research. There are vast domains and research questions that NIH completely ignores because of its profound leftist bias. This is likely their most impactful bias, the way in which NIH is most harmful to the American people.

   a. Benefits of religious faith, church attendance, prayer, etc. This was an emerging area of research before 2010, and then mostly disappeared, at least at NIH, as the left radicalized. Most such research now is foreign, with some notable work on effects of Islamic prayer (Salat), for example.

   b. Male suicide. American men commit suicide at extremely high rates, much higher than any other English-speaking country, especially white and American Indian men (28 and 39 per 100k, respectively), and 4x the rate for women. Surprisingly, NIH has nothing focused on this. The research community is biased against men, especially white men.

   c. Relatively less focus on individual behavior and health outcomes, in favor of “social determinants of health” and leftist dogma like “systemic racism” asserted as causes. There’s little account of human agency, internal locus of control, lifestyle, etc. It was inevitable that the NYT would publish a piece criticizing the RFK/Hegseth 100-50 challenge, for example, and there’s persistent tension between the MAHA premise of individual agency and the newish leftist embrace of Big Pharma/reflexive defense of arbitrary pharmaceutical products.

As you can see, a DEI-only approach will miss most of the ideological bias at NIH and NSF. It doesn’t account for large swaths of leftist ideology, including the Orwellian “misinformation” and “vaccine hesitancy” research. Nor does it account for suppressed data/research or the gaping holes in NIH’s portfolio. I think the missing research is the most impactful bias of all, particularly on male suicide and the health benefits of religious practice.

At this point, there’s a real risk that we’ll waste this precious opportunity to systematically address the way the left has captured and corroded NIH and NSF. This is our opportunity to fully remove leftist ideology from federally-funded “scientific” research and to reform these institutions to actually conduct/fund high-impact research that they’ve avoided because of their political ideology. Without a systematic approach and framework, nothing will change long-term.

Joe Duarte grew up in small copper mining towns in Southern Arizona, earned his PhD in social psychology, and focuses on political bias in media and academic research. You can find him on X here and contact him at gravity at protonmail.com.