NEW ORLEANS — A senior adviser to the leader of the National Institutes of Health opened his speech to a national gathering of diabetes researchers with a full-throated endorsement of the Make America Healthy Again movement. Then, during the fireside chat that followed, he withstood sustained cheers for criticism of deep funding cuts to the nation’s biomedical research enterprise that he was asked to explain.
“I could have written the MAHA agenda,” Richard Woychik, who works closely with NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, said Friday, recalling when he first learned last October of the policy embraced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“The MAHA strategy, it really harnesses NIH-wide innovation, and it’s all about better understanding and focusing on preventing and reducing the burden of diabetes throughout the follow-up strategic approaches,” he said. “Diabetes is one of the clearest examples of why NIH needs an integrated approach to chronic diseases.”
Former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, Woychik delivered the keynote address to open the American Diabetes Association’s 2026 scientific sessions after Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, canceled his appearance. ADA cited a “last-minute, unexpected scheduling conflict” that required an in-person meeting with President Trump. Woychik repeatedly said he and Bhattacharya were closely aligned on NIH objectives.
