National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya responded to complaints from nearly 4,500 of his scientist employees protesting his leadership of the premier biomedical research agency.

Bhattacharya responded in a social media post on X to the complaints of thousands of NIH employees who signed a petition-style complaint about problems the agency has experienced since Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services in January.

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The NIH employees, including 21 Nobel Prize laureates across various biomedical fields, wrote in their petition that Bhattacharya’s NIH has “politicized research” by terminating 2,100 grants totaling $9.5 billion, undermined the peer review process, cut off global collaboration, and fired essential scientists and agency staff.

The scientists dubbed their petition the “Bethesada Declaration” as a nod to Bhattacharya’s role in drafting the 2020 Great Barrington Declaration, a document signed by a cohort of scientists critical of lockdown policies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As of late Monday afternoon, more than 3,500 people had signed their names to the declaration. More than 1,000 others signed the declaration anonymously for fear of reprisal.

Bhattacharya responded by saying that the complaint reflected “some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions NIH has taken in recent months.”

“We’re working to remove ideological influence from science,” Bhattacharya wrote on X. “NIH funding must be based on provable, testable hypotheses, not ideological narratives. Projects that don’t meet that bar are discontinued so we can focus on rigorous, impactful research.”

The NIH director also said the petition’s claims about peer review “are misunderstood” and the goal of his directorship is to expand publishing while still “strengthening transparency, rigor, and reproducibility in NIH-funded research.”

Bhattacharya has been a leading advocate for addressing a lack of reliability and replicability of experimentation in scientific research.

Addressing the problem of replication in basic science is one of the primary objectives of an executive order President Donald Trump signed in May to bring back so-called “gold-standard science,” a key phrase of the Make America Healthy Again agenda.

Regarding the roughly 1,500 NIH employees who have been fired since February, Bhattacharya also said “each termination case” is being reviewed, while some employees have “already been reinstated.”

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“As NIH priorities evolve, so must our staffing to stay mission-focused and responsibly manage taxpayer dollars,” Bhattacharya said on X.

Bhattacharya is set to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee on Tuesday regarding Trump’s proposed budget, which would slash the agency’s budget by roughly 40%.