When National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya started laying out his plans in 2025, he emphasized replication as part of the gold standard for science. In March, he launched the $850,000 Replication Prize for replicating high-impact areas of biomedical research. During his confirmation hearing, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggested a replication effort worth 20% of the NIH’s $47 billion budget.
However, these plans have since been dramatically scaled down to $174 million for “efforts to make rigorous research methods and replicating experiments a routine part of scientists’ work,” following a report from NIH’s Council of Councils that raised two concerns about the original plans: 1) being prohibitively expensive and 2) unfairly undermining confidence in individual scientists’ work.