Jay Bhattacharya went to CPAC last month to make a case for restructuring the National Institutes of Health. He reached back 80 years for his founding document, invoking Vannevar Bush and the 1945 Science: The Endless Frontier report as intellectual cover for the Trump administration's most aggressive rewrite of biomedical research funding in decades.
The irony appears to have been lost on the audience.
Bush's report is the foundational text of the modern NIH. It made the case for federal investment in basic science. But buried in its final pages is a passage that directly contradicts the direction Bhattacharya is pushing the agency. The new agency Bush proposed "should recognize that freedom of inquiry must be preserved and should leave internal control of policy, personnel, and the method and scope of research to the institutions in which it is carried on," according to a primary source collection of the report hosted by MIT. Not agency officials. Not the White House. The institutions themselves.
Bhattacharya laid out his restructuring plan at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas on March 28. The core proposal separates NIH grant funding into two buckets. One pays for scientists and their research projects. The other funds institutional overhead, known as indirect costs. Bhattacharya wants to cap those indirect cost rates at 15 percent, compared to the 61.5 percent Duke currently receives or the 40 to 50 percent typical at major research universities, according to the Duke Chronicle. The remaining institutional support would shift to what he called a market-based competition. The effect would be a significant redistribution of NIH money away from elite research universities and toward a broader set of institutions. His framing at CPAC echoed Bush's language almost precisely, RedState reported: "There was a man named Vannevar Bush. He wrote a book called The Endless Frontier that warned that the scientific progress of the United States was becoming unevenly distributed. Too much research capacity, he argued, was concentrated in a small number of institutions."
The 1945 report did note concentration of research capacity. What it explicitly rejected was centralized control of the research itself. The report argued for placing funds with universities and research institutions precisely because they were independent of direct government management. Bush worried about political interference in science. He built the system's autonomy into the architecture.
Bhattacharya has not hidden his ambition to reshape the NIH's institutional landscape. He has called the agency "the research arm of MAHA," Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s Make America Healthy Again movement, according to the Duke Chronicle. He launched a Scientific Freedom lecture series in March with Matthew Ridley, a former journalist known for fringe views on COVID and climate, as the inaugural speaker, according to Ars Technica. The NIH canceled 5,844 total grants in 2025, according to Nature. Approximately 2,600 grants remain unfunded, totaling $1.4 billion, despite court orders requiring reinstatement in some cases, the Duke Chronicle reported. The indirect cost cap was blocked by a circuit court. The institutional restructuring plan remains the stated direction of the agency.
Former NIH officials and science policy historians have pushed back sharply. The complaint is not merely that the restructuring would hurt elite universities. It is that the specific autonomy protections Bush embedded in his model are being stripped away in the name of the man who wrote them. Institutional overhead pays for equipment cores, lab technicians, compliance systems, and the infrastructure that lets scientists actually work. When Bhattacharya says "scientists lead the way rather than woke institutions," he separates the two. In practice, the indirect cost structure is what funds the technicians who run the instruments, the cores that different labs share, the grad students who collect data. Strip the institutional support and you have scientists without labs, without equipment, without the infrastructure that took decades to build.
The 15 percent cap, if it survives court challenges, would reduce NIH's total grant spending at Duke alone by an estimated $75 million annually, based on Duke's own financial disclosures. At Stanford, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins, the figures would be proportionally large. These are not bureaucracy costs. They are the operating budget of the American biomedical research engine.
What happens next is a legal question as much as a policy one. The indirect cost cap was blocked. The grant cancellations are being challenged. Bhattacharya is pursuing his agenda through administrative action and appropriations pressure, working around court orders where possible. The broader reshaping of who gets NIH money and on what terms is still in motion.
The administration frames this as democratizing science, spreading opportunity beyond a closed circle of elite institutions. The historical parallel Bush drew was to agricultural extension programs that brought federal research funding to farmers across the country. But Bush's own text drew a sharp line: the government should fund science and build institutions, not manage them. He trusted the institutions he was creating. Bhattacharya's version of Bush keeps the funding, removes the trust.
That distinction matters for anyone building a biotech company, running a clinical trial, or pitching a drug development pipeline that depends on academic research partners. The institutional infrastructure of American biomedicine did not appear by accident. It was designed, deliberately, to be independent. The man whose name was invoked to dismantle it wrote those independence protections into the founding document. The CPAC audience cheered anyway.
