I wanted to thank everyone who came out to our live audience taping of the podcast last night in DC. About 200 TPM Readers joined Kate and me in downtown DC where we discussed nomination hearings and more. We hope you had a great time. We definitely did. If you’re a regular podcast listener we’ll be posting last night’s edition, just a little later than usual. We expect to have it in your feeds sometime Friday afternoon.
This was our first time out doing one of these and we’ll be doing more of them. Later this year we’re going to try to do our first live event beyond the east coast. I know this can come off as some kind of east coast elitism. But really it’s logistical. We’re a very small organization. And we have staff in DC and New York. So we can scout out locations, set things up, have people in place to do all the little things that go into an event. Anywhere else is totally different and a different level of planning and resources. But we’re up for it. So we’ll be checking in with readers to see where the demand is — West Coast, Chicago, St. Louis, Texas or any of the gagilion other places in the USA … We have no idea. But somewhere off the eastern seaboard. So keep an eye out for that. And thank you again to everyone who came out. We truly appreciate it and we’re honored by your readership and support.
Democrats at the national level were soundly defeated in all seven presidential swing states when voters went to the polls ten weeks ago. But Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House is just one part of the story.
Down-ballot, Democratic candidates in statewide contests consistently won more votes than the top of the ticket, allowing Democrats to eke out U.S. Senate wins in Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona, and heralding the return of ticket-splitting, a phenomenon that had largely vanished in recent elections — until 2024.
This article first appeared at ProPublica. ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
Lifesaving HIV treatments. Cures for hepatitis C. New tuberculosis regimens and a vaccine for RSV.
These and other major medical breakthroughs exist in large part thanks to a major division of the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet.
For decades, researchers with funding from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have labored quietly in red and blue states across the country, conducting experiments, developing treatments and running clinical trials. With its $6.5 billion budget, NIAID has played a vital role in discoveries that have kept the nation at the forefront of infectious disease research and saved millions of lives.
Then came the COVID-19 pandemic.
NIAID helped lead the federal response, and its director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, drew fire amid school closures nationwide and recommendations to wear face masks. Lawmakers were outraged to learn that the agency had funded an institute in China that had engaged in controversial research bioengineering viruses, and questioned whether there was sufficient oversight. Republicans in Congress have led numerous hearings and investigations into NIAID’s work, flattened NIH’s budget and proposed a total overhaul of the agency.
More recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, has said he wants to fire and replace 600 of the agency’s 20,000 employees and shift research away from infectious diseases and vaccines, which are at the core of NIAID’s mission to understand, treat and prevent infectious, immunologic and allergic diseases. He has said that half of NIH’s budget should focus on “preventive, alternative and holistic approaches to health.” He has a particular interest in improving diets.
Even the most staunch defenders of NIH agree the agency could benefit from reforms. Some would like to see fewer institutes, while others believe there should be term limits for directors. There are important debates over whether to fund and how to oversee controversial research methods, and concerns about the way the agency has handledtransparency. Scientists inside and outside of the institute agree that work needs to be done to restore public trust in the agency.
But experts and patient advocates worry that an overhaul or dismantling of NIAID without a clear understanding of the critical work performed there could imperil not only the development of future lifesaving treatments but also the nation’s place at the helm of biomedical innovation.
“The importance of NIAID cannot be overstated,” said Greg Millett, vice president and director of public policy at amfAR, a nonprofit dedicated to AIDS research and advocacy. “The amount of expertise, the research, the breakthroughs that have come out of NIAID — It’s just incredible.”
To understand how NIAID works and what’s at stake with the new administration, ProPublica spoke with people who have worked for NIAID, received funding from it, or served on boards or panels that advise the institute.
Decisions, Decisions
The director of NIAID is appointed by the head of the NIH, who must be approved by the Senate. Directors have broad discretion to determine what research to fund and where to award grants, although traditionally those decisions are informed by recommendations from panels of outside experts.
Fauci led NIAID for nearly 40 years. He’d navigated controversy in the past, particularly in the early years of the HIV epidemic when community activists criticized him for initially excluding them from the research agenda. But in general until the pandemic, he enjoyed relatively solid bipartisan support for his work, which included a strong focus on vaccine research and development. After he retired in 2022, he was replaced by Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, an HIV researcher who was formerly the director of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She has spent much of her time in the halls of Congress working to restore bipartisan support for the institution.
NIH directors typically span presidential administrations. But Donald Trump has nominated Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH, and current director Dr. Monica Bertagnolli told staff this week that she would resign on Jan. 17. A Stanford professor, Bhattacharya has spent his career studying health policy issues like the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the efficacy of U.S. funding for HIV treatments internationally. He also researched the NIH, concluding that while the agency funds a lot of innovative or novel research, it should do even more.
In March 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal arguing that the death toll from the pandemic would likely be far lower than predicted and called for lockdown policies to be reevaluated. That October, he helped write a declaration that recommended lifting COVID-19 restrictions for those “at minimal risk of death” until herd immunity could be reached. In an interview with the libertarian magazine Reason in June, he said he believes the COVID-19 epidemic most likely originated from a lab accident in China and that he can’t see Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which led to the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines at unprecedented speed, as a total success because it was part of the same research agenda.
Bhattacharya declined an interview request from ProPublica about his priorities for the agency. A recent Wall Street Journal article said he is considering how to link “academic freedom” on college campuses to NIH grants, though it’s not clear how he would measure that or implement such a change. He’s also raised the idea of term limits for directors and said the pandemic “was just a disaster for American science and public health policy,” which is now in desperate need of reform.
Where the Money Goes
Grants from NIAID flow to nearly every state and more than half of the congressional districts across the country, supporting thousands of jobs nationwide. Last year, nearly $5 billion of NIAID’s $6.5 billion budget went to U.S. organizations outside the institute, according to a ProPublica analysis of NIH’s RePORT, an online database of its expenditures.
In 2024, Duke University in North Carolina and Washington University in Missouri were NIAID’s largest grantees, receiving more than $190 and $173 million, respectively, to study, among other things, HIV, West Nile vaccines and biodefense.
Over the past five years, $10.6 billion, or about 40% of NIAID’s budget to external U.S. institutions, went to states that voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, the analysis found. Research suggests that every dollar spent by NIH generates from $2.50 to $8 in economic activity.
That money is key to advancing medicine as well as careers in science. Most students and postdoctoral researchers rely on the funding and prestige of NIH grants to launch into the profession.
New Drugs and Global Influence
The NIH pays for most of the basic research globally into new drugs. The private sector relies on this public funding; researchers at Bentley University found that NIH money was behind every new pharmaceutical approved from 2010 through 2019.
That includes therapies for kids with RSV, COVID-19 vaccines and Ebola treatments, all of which have key patents based on NIAID-funded research.
Research from NIAID has also improved treatment for chronic diseases. New understandings of inflammation from NIAID-funded research has led to cutting-edge research into cures for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, and a growing body of evidence shows how viruses can have long-term impacts, from multiple sclerosis to long COVID. When private companies turn that research into blockbuster drugs, the public benefits from new treatments, as well as jobs and economic growth.
The weight of NIAID’s funding also allows it to play quieter roles that have been essential to advancing science and the United States’ role in biomedicine, several people said.
The institute brings together scientists who are normally competitors to share findings and tackle big research questions. Having that neutral space is essential to pushing knowledge forward and ultimately spurring breakthroughs, said Matthew Rose of the Human Rights Campaign, who has served on multiple NIH advisory boards. “Academic bodies are very competitive with one another. Having NIH pull the grantees together is helpful to make sure they talk to one another and share research.”
NIAID also funds researchers internationally, ensuring the U.S. continues to have an influential voice in global conversations about biosecurity.
Nancy Sullivan, a former senior investigator at NIAID, said that NIAID’s power is its ability to invest in a broad understanding of human health. “It’s the basic research that allows us to develop treatments,” she said. “You never know which part of fundamental research is going to be the lynchpin for curing a disease or defining a disease so you know how to treat it,” she said.
Sullivan should know: It was her work at NIAID that led four years ago to the first approved treatment for Ebola.
Amid reports that the adults in Donald Trump’s room may be convincing him to put some guardrails in place on his HHS nominee — whom he vowed to let “go wild on health” — there are also reportedly some cracks forming around the nominee himself within Republican circles.
But it’s not clear if the anti-RFK contingent of Trump allies is yet strong enough to actually make a dent, let alone imperil, RFK Jr.’s ability to be confirmed as HHS secretary.
During her confirmation hearing on Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi refused multiple times to acknowledge Donald Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, employing the standard Republican dodge of observing in various ways that Joe Biden is currently the president: Biden was “sworn in,” Trump “left office,” and that there was a “peaceful transition of power,” she said at one point.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Texas, by way of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, is before the Supreme Court on a conservative culture-war issue.
This case centers on a Texas law that requires sites with one-third or more content that is “harmful to minors” to verify the age of users before granting access.
There’s a cottage industry of takes these days on how Democrats can again become the “party of the working class.” Many of those are reactive, defensive, operate on misleading or ill-considered concepts of what the 21st century working class even is. But today I had one of these pop into my inbox that I read and thought, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. The gist is that Democrats should make themselves the party of gig workers. The title of the article is “Champion the Self-Employed.” But as author Will Norris explains, the demographic and economic profile of those technically categorized as “self-employed” has changed pretty dramatically in recent years. It still includes the generally high-earning and disproportionately white and male consultants and solo operators of various sorts. But as a group it’s now much, much larger — especially in the wake of the pandemic — and is more female and less white. It’s also much lower income, more precarious.
North Carolina state appeals court judge and Republican state Supreme Court candidate Jefferson Griffin filed a legal brief on Tuesday with the state Supreme Court, laying out his latest argument for why the court should toss out November ballots and overturn the results of the state Supreme Court Race in his favor.
We should all understand by now that the vaunted FBI “background check” – in the context of presidential nominees, not run-of-the-mill security clearances – is not what it’s been falsely portrayed as for decades. The notion of some big high-level vetting of nominees’ backgrounds sounds good, like a fancy form of due diligence. You want this job? Then you need to consent to throwing open your whole life to FBI scrutiny. But it was always less formalized and more subjective than commonly understood and described in news reports.
Normally, transitions and administrations want desperately to know potential personnel vulnerabilities in advance. The entire point of a security check is to determine whether someone is already ethically compromised or has potential areas that an adversary could leverage to compromise them — from hidden affairs to gambling problems to substance abuse. At a fundamental level, a security check is about whether a potential nominee is worthy of public trust. You generally, as a point of good government, don’t want senior officials in sensitive positions open to compromise or blackmail.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, sees background checks differently — they want to hide and obfuscate the misdeeds, liabilities, weaknesses, conflicts-of-interest, corruption, and points of existing or potential compromise of their nominees until they’re safely ensconced in the highest level of the US government and already reading the nation’s most sensitive secrets.
As Graff notes, what has shifted that makes the whole edifice wobbly and unsustainable now is that in the past the president wanted the FBI to find any smoking guns, skeletons in the closet, or unexploded ordinance. It was in the president’s interest to smoke this stuff out before they invested their own political capital in a nominee, not to mention better for national security, the smooth operation of government, and a host of other substantive reasons. There was an alignment of interest between the president and the FBI that has broken down under Trump.
What we’re left with is a mechanism that pawns off the blame for unfit and risky nominees on the FBI, rather than affixing that responsibility where it firmly belongs: on the president and his team. The White House, the transition team, and senators all use the FBI for cover, dodging their own responsibilities. That’s not really the FBI’s fault, though I question whether it should be involved at all any longer. It’s in an impossible position, with its credibility and professionalism being used to provide political cover.
We’re 10 years into the Trump era, but we’re still slow to jettison the things that no longer serve a functional purpose and may in fact camouflage and obscure the truth of things. That’s understandable in part because it feels like we’re contributing to Trump’s destruction by tossing out things that used to work. The challenge is not to maintain the form of things as a substitute for the substance of things, especially when the substance has drained away and the form is only a facade masking malfeasance.
So much of Trump’s campaign of retribution, destruction, and corruption comes down to Pam Bondi serving as attorney general. We’ll be liveblogging her confirmation hearing, which begins at 9:30 a.m. ET.
Pete Hegseth Confirmation Hearing Takeaways
The joke nomination of Pete Hegseth to be defense secretary picked up crucial support from Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) despite a flailing confirmation hearing in which Senate Republicans did everything they could to protect and shield the singularly unfit and unqualified nominee. If you missed the hearing, a sampling of the rundowns:
Politico: Seven wild moments from Hegseth’s hearing
Aaron Blake: 4 takeaways from Pete Hegseth’s confirmation hearing
Trump II Clown Show
WaPo: Trump’s Energy pick rejects link between climate change and wildfires
Politico: Sen. John Curtis (R-UT) airs doubts about Tulsi Gabbard nomination
WSJ: Tulsi Gabbard’s Charm Offensive Draws Skepticism From Republican Senators:
In her meeting with Sen. James Lankford (R., Okla.), Gabbard couldn’t clearly articulate what the role of director of national intelligence entails, two Senate Republican aides and a Trump transition official said. When she met with Sen. Mike Rounds (R., S.D.), Gabbard seemed confused about a key U.S. national-security surveillance power, a top legislative priority for nearly every member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, conflating it with other issues, the aides said.
Not-A-Normal Transition
House Speaker Mike Johnson ordered flags at the U.S. Capitol to fly at full-staff during the inauguration after Trump complained about the flags being lowered following the death of President Jimmy Carter.
A U.S. government threat assessment of Trump’s inauguration obtained by Politico warned that is “an attractive potential target” for violent extremists but authorities have not identified any specific credible threats.
President Biden will give a farewell address to the nation tonight at 8 ET from behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office.
Picking Through Jack Smith’s Report
TPM’s Josh Kovensky: “Tucked into ex-Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 137-page report on Donald Trump’s 2020 self-coup attempt, he explores a question that’s hung in the background of the case: Why wasn’t Trump ever charged with insurrection?”
Politico: “A common sentiment on the left is that Garland was too deferential to Trump after Joe Biden took office and failed to unleash the full might of the department on the former president for nearly two years. … But Smith’s report emphasized that the Justice Department was aggressively investigating leads related to Trump long before the special counsel’s tenure began. Litigation tactics by Trump and his allies, Smith argued, were the key factors that slowed the process to a crawl.”
Lisa Needham: “The report grounds the discussion of the right to vote in the Reconstruction era. Though Black voters were guaranteed the right to vote following the Civil War, whites engaged in assaults and acts of terror to prevent them from doing so. To address that, Smith explains, Congress passed the Enforcement Act of 1870 and established the DOJ that same year. That act was the predecessor statute of 18 U.S.C. § 241, the modern-day law Trump was charged with violating. That law makes it unlawful to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate someone from exercising a right secured by the Constitution — like voting and having your vote counted.”
House GOP Passes Anti-Trans Bill
Only two (or three, depending on how you count it) Democrats defected as the GOP-controlled House passed a bill barring transgender women from competing in women’s sports.
Abbott Publicly Threatens Aggie Prez
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) threatened to fire the president of Texas A&M over the university’s participation in a conference focused on networking and mentoring opportunities for “historically underrepresented students.”
Costco Resists Anti-DEI Movement
WSJ: “In a steady parade of companies retreating from their diversity efforts, Costco Wholesale is standing out by holding fast.”
GOP Power Grab In Minnesota
Republicans in the Minnesota House pulled a fast – and possibly illegal – one yesterday.
State Democrats had boycotted the opening session to deprive Republicans of a quorum, prompting the presiding officer to suspend legislative business for the day. But Republicans proceeded to purport to elect their own House speaker anyway.
Mother Jones has a good rundown of the unusual series of events that have created complicated power dynamics over who will ultimately control the state House.
‘If You Want To Take It Outside, We Can Do That’
In her typical highly performative way, Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) went off on Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX) during a House committee hearing Wednesday:
Crockett: Somebody’s campaign coffers are struggling right now so she’s going to keep saying trans trans trans.. Child listen
Mace: I am no child! Do not call me a child. I am a grown woman. If you want to take it outside pic.twitter.com/o2EBHzcwoT
There are a few things that are critical to understanding the Trump Cabinet nominations and how Senate Democrats should approach them. The first and most important is that in the case of every nomination the question is entirely up to Republicans. Republicans have a three-seat majority. They have the vote of the Vice President in a tie. What happens or doesn’t happen is entirely a matter decided within the Republican caucus. It is totally out of Democrats’ control. What follows from that is that everything Democrats do, inside the hearing room or outside, is simply and solely a matter of raising the stakes of decisions Republicans make and raising those stakes for the next election. The aim isn’t for any Democratic senator to try to claw their way through the steel wall of Republican loyalty to Donald Trump. It’s to do everything they can to illustrate that Donald Trump staffs his administration with unqualified and/or dangerous toadies and that Senate Republicans are fine with this because they put loyalty to Trump over loyalty to country.
This all sounds obvious. And it is obvious. But people struggle to see the obvious as obvious. I’m seeing headlines and comments that Democrats failed to change the dynamic or knock any Republicans free. That’s a crazy standard since the dynamic is set. None of this is about whether Hegseth gets confirmed. Republicans control that. It’s about establishing the record Republicans will be running on in 2026 and the stakes for every Senate Republican in a competitive election.
