Francis Collins will continue to lead America’s top biomedical research agency, the National Institutes of Health, he announced today.
Honored to be selected by @POTUS to continue as #NIH Director. I consider it a privilege to continue to lead this noble enterprise.
— Dr. Monica M. Bertagnolli (@NIHDirector) June 6, 2017
President Barack Obama appointed Collins to his post in 2009. Like other appointees of the previous administration, he submitted a letter offering to resign when Donald Trump took office, Nature reports. However, Collins had previously told STAT he “would consider it a privilege” to keep his position, if Trump asked.
Some conservatives agitated for Trump to boot Collins because of Collins’ support for conducting research on embryonic stem cells. Forty members of Congress signed a letter urging Collins be replaced. “Francis Collins is most definitely not pro-life, nor in the same leadership class as Trump,” David A. Prentice, vice president of the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, wrote in an op-ed in USA Today.
Collins may end up helming the NIH through some major changes. The Trump administration has submitted a budget that reduces the agency’s funding 12 percent, from $31.8 billion to $26 billion, and asked for the cuts to come from so-called overhead payments, a move widely decried by scientists, as Science reports.
