As HHS Rails Against Science Politicization, Leading Agency Officials Embrace Right-Wing Political Action
The surprising number of public health officials at CPAC last month highlights what critics say is a disturbing trend.
This piece has been updated from its original email version.
“I’ll tell you, it’s no longer Tony Fauci’s NIH,” Dr. Jay Bhattacharya declared, standing at the podium of the 2026 Conservative Political Action Conference last month, with the event’s logo emblazoned behind him.
The National Institutes of Health Director and acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was there to promote the public health record of the Trump administration and his anti-vax Health and Human Services secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr.
The crowd erupted in applause.
It was an unusual moment—and not just because a serving federal public health official took a shot at the now-retired former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Launched in 1974 by the American Conservative Union and Young Americans for Freedom, CPAC has not traditionally featured leading HHS officials promoting public health policy. The nation’s largest gathering of right-wing activists, operatives, and politicians, the conference is known for spectacle, incendiary rhetoric, and controversial figures. It was at CPAC 2023 that conservative commentator Michael Knowles called for “transgenderism” to be “eradicated.” The following year, Nazis were able to take part in the event without being ejected. In 2025, Steve Bannon did a stiff-arm salute at the conference.
In the past, public health officials have tended to avoid CPAC and similar events as their field aims to be above partisanship. There are examples of public health leaders wading into politics, but generally years before or after their time in HHS.
Prior to becoming NIH director, Dr. Francis Collins, then the former head of the National Human Genome Research Institute, endorsed presidential candidate Barack Obama. Dr. Harold Varmus, who served as NIH director during the Clinton administration, became an informal advisor to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Donald Trump’s former CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, participated in a Heritage Foundation event in 2024 with Dr. Martin Kulldorff, who is now the chief science officer for the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation at HHS. Redfield later became a visiting fellow at Heritage.
A notable exception, however, was George W. Bush’s HHS secretary, Tommy Thompson, who served from 2001 to 2005. Thompson spoke to the American Legislative Exchange Council in 2002 and was booked as a speaker for CPAC that year. Thompson’s successor, Mike Leavitt, came under fire for blogging about abortion.
A review of archived CPAC website snapshots—conference highlights, agendas, and speaker lists going back to 1996—found no previous examples of NIH or CDC directors appearing at the conference. Agendas and speaker lists before that are not readily available online, and the organization did not respond to our requests for production.
“As a political appointee, NIH Directors have appeared at political events, usually around specific health-related issues where their insights and endorsements of specific policies may be politically helpful,” said Dr. Jeremy Berg, former director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences at the NIH. “But I do not know of other examples where an NIH Director has spoken at such political and partisan events, just to speak about his vision or alleged accomplishments.”
Bhattacharya is not a typical NIH director. In many ways, he has more in common with the CPAC crowd than he does with his predecessors at the agency. His rise to power began with his involvement in right-wing political networks amid the COVID-19 pandemic, fighting government efforts to control the spread of the virus, which he argued ought to be allowed to spread for herd immunity. His subsequent Senate confirmation came down to a party-line vote.
Bhattacharya’s presence at the right-wing conference highlights how public health has been at the center of political debate in recent years—a shift heralded six years ago by the appearance of HHS Secretary Alex Azar at CPAC 2020, as the SARS-CoV-2 virus was beginning its spread across the country.
Bhattacharya was not the only HHS official to appear at CPAC this year. Others included Secretary Kennedy, Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Director Mehmet Oz, and anti-vaxxer Dr. Robert Malone, a member of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee.
Despite this significant roster of HHS leaders at the conference, the department has been messaging about depoliticizing public health and restoring “gold standard science.” In September last year, Kennedy published an editorial in The Wall Street Journal, lamenting that “over the decades, bureaucratic inertia, politicized science and mission creep have corroded that purpose and squandered public trust.”
But as examples of the politicization, Kennedy cited a laundry list of right-wing and anti-vax grievances with U.S. pandemic policy: “cloth masks on toddlers, arbitrary 6-foot distancing, boosters for healthy children, prolonged school closings, economy-crushing lockdowns, and the suppression of low-cost therapeutics in favor of experimental and ineffective drugs.”
Critics have accused the Trump administration of doing a two-step on public health policy, claiming to combat the politicization of science while at the very same time, driving it. Colette Delawalla, founder of the advocacy group Stand Up for Science, compared the mismatch between official rhetoric and actions to George Orwell’s 1984.
“The Trump Administration banned words and are actively dictating the types of science that we can conduct, based on what aligns with their ‘priorities,’” Delawalla said. “This is Orwellian ‘ignorance is strength’ level censorship and…politicization of science.”
(The Accountability Journalism Institute, which publishes the Important Context newsletter, provided fiscal sponsorship to Stand Up for Science before it secured nonprofit status.)
For months, HHS has been targeting gender-affirming care, describing it as “sex-rejecting procedures”—a term not used in medical practice that originated from the Christian Right—and implementing policy changes to restrict access by transgender and nonbinary Americans. Lifesaving vaccines have also come under review, including the hepatitis B shot for newborns. The CDC updated its vaccine safety page to include untrue narratives about immunizations and autism favored by Kennedy’s anti-vax allies.
Few have been as vocal about fighting supposed liberal politicization of science as Kennedy’s lieutenant, the soft-spoken Bhattacharya. But while the NIH director has railed against agenda-driven science, CPAC is not the only far-right platform of which he has availed himself. In December 2025, Bhattacharya was a speaker at “Americafest,” the annual conference of Turning Point USA. There, he joined a roster of speakers that included white nationalists to celebrate the life of the late Charlie Kirk. The previous month, Bhattacharya accepted an award from the Brownstone Institute.
In August that year, just weeks after telling PBS that “science should not be partisan,” he appeared on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, known for its promotion of COVID-19 misinformation. During the appearance, which came the day after a radicalized anti-vaxxer fired hundreds of rounds into buildings on the CDC campus, he cast doubt on mRNA COVID vaccines.
As Important Context has previously reported, Bhattacharya has faced growing dissension inside his agency over what staffers say is a naked politicization of science. His first agency town hall was plagued by disruptions as workers questioned research cuts. The NIH has terminated grants relating to topics like LGBTQIA+ health and mRNA vaccine technology—two targets of the political right and Trump administration. STAT News reported recently that researchers were forced to change hundreds of grant titles to receive NIH funding
In a public declaration released in June last year with the assistance of Delawalla’s group, hundreds of NIH workers charged that research cuts on Bhattacharya’s watch were being made “based on political ideology.”
“To achieve political aims, NIH has targeted multiple universities with indiscriminate grant terminations, payment freezes for ongoing research, and blanket holds on awards regardless of the quality, progress, or impact of the science,” it read.
Berg noted that Bhattacharya had previously “declined to speak at at least one other event because the event had been politicized by including local Democratic politicians who were going to speak of the importance of NIH in the local community and the country.”
The event in question was a rally following a meeting with some of the declaration signers. According to one of the organizers Important Context spoke with, the NIH director became angry and refused to join due to the participation of Democratic lawmakers.
“The hypocrisy is shocking but not surprising,” Berg said.
For his part, the NIH director has defended his record, even bragged about how he’d “cured DEI”—a term he has not clearly defined—at his agency in an op-ed for The Spectator, a right-wing outlet.
In his CPAC speech, Bhattacharya also took a dig at “DEI,” declaring, “80 years ago, Vannevar Bush challenged us to build a scientific enterprise that served the entire country. We today have an opportunity to strengthen that system for a new era by embracing market-based approaches, by advancing drug repurposing, and are committing ourselves to scientific rigor, getting rid of DEI and all the other nonsense.”
Science policy experts have disputed Bhattacharya’s characterization of Bush’s argument, telling STAT News that the NIH director mischaracterized it to support the Trump administration’s record.
Delawalla said she was “rather surprised at the content of Jay’s speech because he has overseen the decimation of HIV research and drug repurposing efforts around the nation by cutting hundreds of active grants in these areas.”
“I implore Jay Bhattacharya to keep Vannevar Bush’s name out of his mouth while he is actively bringing about the destruction of the scientific ecosystem that Bush worked so hard to implement in the US,” she said.
Bhattacharya closed out his speech with Trump campaign slogans, telling the crowd, “Remember what President Trump and Secretary Kennedy is [sic] leading us toward—to make America great again—and to do that, we must make America healthy again.”