Anthony Fauci became America's most powerful unelected bureaucrat during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The media treated him like a saint while he wielded unprecedented control over scientific funding and public health policy.
And Anthony Fauci was steaming mad when his legacy was smashed to pieces with this daring move.
Trump's NIH director just torched everything Fauci spent decades building
Dr. Jay Bhattacharya took over as Director of the National Institutes of Health in April 2025 with a clear mission from President Donald Trump: dismantle the corrupt empire Fauci built over nearly four decades.
Fauci spent 38 years as Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1984 to 2022.
He advised seven Presidents and accumulated more power over American science than any unelected official in history.
The new NIH director published a scorching piece in The Spectator titled "How we cured DEI at the National Institutes of Health" that systematically destroys Fauci's institutional legacy.
Fauci didn't just run NIAID — he shaped the entire culture of federal public health where loyalty mattered more than science and ideology trumped merit.
"Over the last decade and a half this mission has been corrupted by a new mission and ideology: diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI)," Bhattacharya wrote. "This political ideology was reflected in all aspects of the NIH, including hiring practices, promotion and tenure, employee training, performance reviews, communications, management and, yes, even science."¹
Researchers were forced to write DEI statements that functioned as loyalty oaths to the bureaucracy Fauci built.
The NIH gave bonuses to bureaucrats who promoted DEI and handed out "diversity supplements" to universities based on race instead of scientific ability.
"For its entire history NIH funding decisions were made to reach scientific goals. DEI drove decisions to be made to reach political goals instead, requiring NIH scientists to write DEI statements – de facto loyalty oaths," Bhattacharya explained.²
Every piece of this apparatus has Fauci's fingerprints all over it.
Bhattacharya systematically demolished Fauci's life's work
Fauci retired in December 2022 thinking his legacy was secure after 54 years at NIH.
The murals they put up of him on NIH's campus showed how completely he dominated the institution — until Trump's team ripped them down earlier this year.
Bhattacharya took a wrecking ball to the entire system.
"NIH's devotion to DEI ended when President Trump took office in January 2025. At the NIH, we dismantled the DEI apparatus and refocused the NIH on its age-old mission," Bhattacharya declared.³
The new director eliminated DEI loyalty oaths and scrubbed the ideology from performance reviews, hiring decisions and grant applications.
The NIH terminated hundreds of funding notices and modified more than 6,000 grants that contained the woke language Fauci embedded throughout the system.
Between 2011 and 2019 — while Fauci was still running things — life expectancies flatlined for nearly every racial group and America's chronic disease crisis exploded.
None of Fauci's DEI ideology improved a single American's health.
"Scientists will no longer have to mouth DEI shibboleths to garner funding but instead propose excellent science that helps make America healthy again," Bhattacharya wrote.⁴
The bureaucrats Fauci trained are furious.
Several hundred staged a walkout during one of Bhattacharya's town halls and signed something called the "Bethesda Declaration" crying about the changes.
Activist judges tried blocking the reforms because the federal bureaucracy Fauci built extends into the courts.
But Bhattacharya kept pushing forward, destroying every piece of the institutional structure Fauci created.
Everything Fauci built just collapsed in 10 months
The contrast between these two men tells you everything about why Fauci's legacy deserved demolition.
"I will never do a devastating takedown of a scientist that disagrees with me," Bhattacharya told OutKick. "That is not conducive to good science happening. I fully expect there to be scientists who disagree with me. And if they show me data where I'm wrong, I will change my mind."⁵
Fauci ran the exact opposite operation.
When Bhattacharya and his colleagues published the Great Barrington Declaration questioning lockdowns in 2020, Fauci had his then-boss Francis Collins demand a "quick and devastating published take down" of scientists who dared challenge his authority.
That's how Fauci operated for 38 years — crush dissent, reward loyalty, accumulate power.
He molded the entire federal public health bureaucracy into a machine that funded political ideology instead of science that actually helps Americans.
Fauci thought his institutional legacy was permanent.
He built systems designed to outlast him and continue his vision long after retirement.
Trump and Bhattacharya just proved him catastrophically wrong.
Everything Fauci spent nearly four decades constructing got systematically dismantled in less than a year.
That's not just a policy change.
That's the complete destruction of a legacy.
Fauci spent his entire career building an empire where he and his ideological allies controlled American science.
Bhattacharya restored merit-based research and obliterated everything Fauci worked for.
No wonder the man's furious — he just watched his life's work get reduced to rubble.
¹ Jay Bhattacharya and Matthew J. Memoli, "How we cured DEI at the National Institutes of Health," The Spectator, December 11, 2025.
² Ibid.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ian Miller, "EXCLUSIVE: NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya Tells OutKick About 'Shocking' COVID Vaccine Info, Failure Of Masks," OutKick, December 9, 2025.
