The Trump administration has whiffed its deadline to ban lab-made pandemic viruses by more than eight weeks, worrying biosafety hawks and undercutting assurances from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) that the policy remains on track.
A May executive order required a handful of multi-agency leaders to oversee producing new federal policies on gain-of-function (GOF) research by Sept. 2.
“The atom has been split in biology with COVID, but nobody seems to be talking about it with urgency,” said Sean Kaufman, CEO and founding partner of biosafety consulting firm Safer Behaviors.
The issue pits Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has for years argued that an NIH-Wuhan Institute of Virology collaboration caused COVID-19, against NIH staff who adamantly oppose that view. In the middle stands NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, whose promotion and protection of a member of Anthony Fauci’s inner circle and waffling statements have left some observers with a sense of déjà vu.
Even discounting weekends, the 120-day deadline has passed by several days. About a month elapsed after the deadline before Democrats’ budget disputes on Capitol Hill shut down the government, inhibiting work on the policy.
Bhattacharya said at the May White House signing ceremony for the GOF executive order that the new rules would “make it go away forever.” But in an August podcast he made less strident comments, calling instead for “a calculation” in conversation with a top aide who described GOF as “sometimes really important.”
In 2016, NIH officials used internal bureaucratic manipulation to wrest control of GOF regulation from the White House and advanced a policy that scrutinized very few projects. Two officials involved in writing the pre-COVID policy that allowed funds to flow to Wuhan are directly involved in writing Trump’s policy now, according to emails described to the DCNF by two former government insiders.
Some experts worry that the language of Trump’s EO is too ambiguous. It cedes much of the decision-making power to the heads of individual agencies like NIH and states that enforcement could include a 5-year ban from grants, half the maximum 10-year debarment period at HHS.
A spokesperson for HHS referred questions to the White House when reached for comment. The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy did not respond to requests for comment.
Hiring And Firing
Staffing shakeups and controversy may help explain the delay.
Gerald Parker, who led the drafting of the executive order from the head of the White House’s Office of Pandemic Preparedness and Response Policy, stepped down from the post this summer due to personal reasons, he confirmed to the DCNF.
The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy has since recruited Anna Puglisi, a former longtime counterintelligence official specializing in Chinese technology, a White House official confirmed to the DCNF. Puglisi’s approach to GOF is unclear from her writing and public comments: Puglisi expressed concern about China’s defiance of global norms on bioweapons in a 2024 paper. Regulators of GOF must consider “the true risk for both not regulating it and over-regulating,” Puglisi told Nature in 2023.
Puglisi did not respond to a request for comment sent through LinkedIn, and no email address for her could be found in an online search.
Following an August DCNF report exposing that one of Bhattacharya’s advisors championed GOF and strongly opposed Trump, NIH fired two other advisors, according to X posts. The employment status of the pro-GOF advisor remains unclear.
NIH’s point person on drafting the GOF policy, Associate Director for Science Policy Lyric Jorgenson, previously led the drafting of President Joe Biden’s GOF policy — a policy Bhattacharya lambasted in 2024. HHS in recent days eliminated an office handling biosecurity at the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), further empowering Jorgenson’s office, another former official said to the DCNF.
Bhattacharya continues to defend his installment of Jeffrey Taubenberger at the top of Fauci’s prior institute, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Taubenberger, who has long performed and advocated for GOF research, from that perch has advised on the GOF policy and will play a key role in implementing it.
️ On the latest episode of The Director’s Desk, I sat down with Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, Acting Director of @NIAIDNews, to discuss the groundbreaking research that @NIH supports that is shaping the fight against infectious, immunologic, and allergic diseases.
Watch our… pic.twitter.com/xDq6RAyxsq
— Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD (@NIHDirector_Jay) August 12, 2025
️ On the latest episode of The Director’s Desk, I sat down with Dr. Jeffery Taubenberger, Acting Director of Déjà Vu
The White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Security Council (NSC) in the summer of 2016 called for a panel assessing GOF projects with a strict checklist, a former NIH insider told the DCNF. Is there an obvious public health benefit? Are there no safer alternatives? Is it ethically justified? The White House would have the final say.
But alarm bells rang at NIH.
The NIH Office of Science Policy by that fall advanced a competing policy preserving power at the Department of Health and Human Services, according to the former NIH insider. Fauci, NIH Director Francis Collins, Collins’ deputy Lawrence Tabak and the NIH Office of Science Policy lobbied other federal agencies to withhold support for the stricter White House policy.
In the end, NIH prevailed in advancing the defanged policy, the former insider said. The deliberations of the HHS committee overseeing GOF would remain secret. Collins and Fauci also stripped the committee of its power to block projects, the Washington Post reported in 2021.
Yet even as NIH leaders fought to maintain control of overseeing GOF projects in the summer of 2016, the rank-and-file staff struggled to do it, according to emails from that same period.
The emails, published in September 2025 by U.S. Right to Know through the Freedom of Information Act, show that in the week leading up to the July 4th holiday the NIH learned that certain coronavirus GOF research would occur in Wuhan, China, yet conducted no national security checks outside of a “letter of support” for the Wuhan lab from University of North Carolina virologist Ralph Baric.
NIH greenlighted the experiments with little further deliberation, considering the agenda so light that week that it canceled its GOF meeting.
An estimated 7.1 million COVID deaths later, the same pattern has taken hold at NIH today.
Two scientists within NIH pushed for an internal review of projects within HHS, DCNF reported in August.
Such a policy would defy the recommendations of scientists like Alina Chan, coauthor of “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19,” and Massachusetts Institute of Technology biologist Kevin Esvelt, who have each called for NIH to report to an independent authority rather than regulate itself.
“The new policy must implement some form of independent oversight so that catastrophic research is not self-regulated,” Chan told the DCNF.
With echoes of 2016, the May 2025 executive order supplanted a stricter one. An earlier executive order included an immediate and permanent statutory ban, the DCNF reported in April.
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