NIH Chief Invokes Bush's Legacy to Dismantle Bush's Vision
Jay Bhattacharya wants to remake American science funding around one idea: accountability. He's using a dead man's name to sell it.
At CPAC in Dallas on March 28, the NIH director invoked Vannevar Bush, the World War II science czar whose 1945 report "Science, The Endless Frontier" became the founding document of modern federal research funding. Bush wanted science driven by scientists. Bhattacharya wants it driven by measurable outcomes and political oversight. Those are different philosophies from different people. What Bhattacharya is doing is closer to defunding the system under Bush's name.
The numbers from the Association of American Medical Colleges tell a story of contraction: since October 2025, NIH has awarded 1,187 new grants, 63 percent fewer than the five-year average for this point in the fiscal year Inside Higher Ed. By late March, NIH had obligated roughly $5.8 billion of its approximately $38 billion in available grants, compared to nearly $9 billion obligated by the same date in the final full fiscal year of the Biden administration Inside Higher Ed. Early career investigators are taking the hardest hit: 6,065 applied for R01-equivalent grants, the NIH's foundational investigator grant mechanism, in 2025 and 1,114 received one, down from 1,423 awards out of 5,446 applicants in 2024 Inside Higher Ed.
The rhetorical sleight of hand is in what Bush actually wrote. The "Endless Frontier" report argued that basic research, science carried out without thought of practical ends, was the foundation of economic, health, and military security Issues in Science and Technology. The Sputnik analogy cuts the opposite way from what Bhattacharya suggests: after Sputnik, Congress and the NIH doubled down on investigator-initiated science, not outcomes-based funding tied to national priorities. Bush's core claim was that you couldn't predict which research would matter, so you funded the researchers and got out of the way.
Bhattacharya's version inverts this. He argues science has become too concentrated at elite institutions, about 20 universities receive a third of NIH funding RedState, and uses that to justify redirecting money toward measurable health outcomes under the "Make America Healthy Again" banner. The diagnosis is real. The prescription is not Bush's.
The administration already tried to impose a 15 percent cap on indirect cost reimbursements, the overhead universities charge to cover lab space, administrative support, and utilities. Congress and the courts blocked it C&EN, and a coalition of higher education groups has proposed an alternative called FAIR, Financial Accountability in Research, that addresses legitimate accountability concerns without unraveling the financial architecture that keeps research institutions running C&EN. But the grant numbers are what they are, and early-career scientists who cannot get R01s do not get a do-over while policy debates play out.
The Sputnik framing at CPAC was deliberate. Sputnik is a story about the US being caught off guard by a technological threat and rallying to close the gap. Bhattacharya is casting the current moment the same way: catch-up science, national priority, measurable results. But Sputnik led to the National Defense Education Act and a massive expansion of the research university system. What Bhattacharya is describing looks less like closing a gap and more like burning down the labs to restructure who gets to use them.
Whether Bush's vision is the right model for 2026 is a legitimate question. Whether Bhattacharya is implementing Bush's vision is not. He is implementing the opposite, and invoking Bush to justify it. That is a problem for anyone who cares about the distinction between what was actually built and what someone says was built in its name.