Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health under the Trump administration, appeared before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Tuesday. In the wide-ranging hearing, Bhattacharya defended the chaotic and disruptive cuts at the institutes he helms while carefully wording responses related to vaccines—seemingly to avoid contradicting his boss, anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. As Bhattacharya testified, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the HELP committee’s ranking member, released a report outlining the state of the NIH. The report concluded that the Trump administration is “failing American patients,” and “destroying medical research through cuts to research grants, terminations of clinical trials, and the chaos it has created.” Since Trump took office, the NIH has terminated or frozen hundreds of millions of dollars for research grants, including $561 million in grants to research the four leading causes of death in America, the report found. Destruction Specifically, Bhattacharya oversaw the disruption of: 116 grants for cancer research, totaling $273 million; 71 grants to study heart disease, totaling $111 million; 65 grants for Alzheimer’s disease, totaling $94 million; and 68 grants for diabetes, totaling $83 million. The report also identified at least 304 clinical trials that were defunded, including 69 that were for children. In the hearing Tuesday, Senators repeatedly brought up the grant and trial cuts, emphasizing that they are disrupting, if not ending, research that could lead to biomedical advances. Senators relayed reports of scientists scaling back their lab work and some being unable to pay their graduate students. Early career scientists are looking to move abroad—while China and Europe are actively recruiting top scientific talent. Meanwhile, patients, some with dire medical conditions, have been abruptly dropped from potentially life-saving clinical trials. Bhattacharya was dismissive of all these concerns. “We didn’t cut any funding,” he claimed. “The United States remains the single best place in the world to do biomedical research.”