In Trump’s chaotic effort to weaken and shred the federal government, no agency is immune, not even the National Institutes of Health, a world-class scientific research institution.
The Washington Post published an overview of the dizzying changes there. The #2 person in the agency was expected to be chosen as Acting Director, but he was passed over for a little-known staff member, who was known for opposing the views of Dr. Fauci during the pandemic. And that was just the start.
The NIH has 6,200 scientists on staff. It is a huge biomedical grant-making machine that dispenses funding to some 2,500 research organizations across the nation.
Science writers Carolyn Y. Johnson and Joel Achenbach reported:
In just six weeks, the Trump administration overturned NIH’s leadership, slowed its main mission of identifying the best new science to fund and silenced personnel at the biggest sponsor of biomedical research in the world — a nearly $48 billion enterprise that supports the work of some 300,000 external scientists.
“It’s terrible. It’s awful. People are afraid to open their emails,” one NIH senior scientist said….
Even in a climate of fear, NIH employees say they want to protect their institution. They worry this winter of disruption may be causing lasting damage to the way science is conducted in the United States.
“The whole thing could just disappear,” said Phil Murphy, senior investigator and chief of the laboratory of molecular immunology at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID). “The biomedical research enterprise in the United States depends largely on NIH dollars. You take the dollars away, the labs go away, and you lose the next generation of scientists.”
I wonder if Dr. Phil Murphy might soon be replaced by a graduate student in political science for his remarks. Or a college dropout on the DOGE team.
In normal times, thousands of scientists on the 320-acre campus conduct basic research on problems such as ALS and heart disease. Clinicians at the research hospital care for patients in cutting-edge clinical trials. Much of this work continued.
But then came a hiring freeze, a travel ban, a communications pause and cancellations of routine grant-review meetings. Scientists were even told they could not purchase the basic lab supplies needed to keep experiments going…
Trump’s executive orders to terminate diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, as well as programs that support “gender ideology,” forced officials to scan the agency for activities, websites, grants and programs that might need to be modified or pulled down..
In the second week, NIH staff members were told by their new director that they could resume work on clinical trials for new drugs.
But senior officials were grappling with a jaw-dropping memo from Trump’s Office of Management and Budget that called for a pause on federal grant activity — one of NIH’s main reasons to exist.
This order seemed to encompass most activities that spread NIH grants across the country, including making research awards, evaluating the most meritorious scientific proposals and even just continuing the funding of existing projects that needed renewal.
Lawsuits were filed, and NIH employees found themselves whipsawed between administration policies and court orders.
On Jan. 29, Tabak wrote a note to colleagues asking them to prepare a summary of activities related to the executive orders on diversity and on sex as a biological variable, as well as efforts to bring them into compliance.
Did this mean a ban on trials that compared how different groups reacted to experimental drugs?
Meanwhile a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to unfreeze NIH funding. But they didn’t.
Then came the biggest blow yet: Late that afternoon, NIH officials were caught off guard by a request from HHS chief of staff Heather Flick Melanson and principal deputy chief of staff Stefanie Spear to post a document immediately.
HHS declared that henceforth NIH would cap at 15 percent the indirect cost rates, or “overhead,” in funding it sends to research institutions. As NIH officials read the notice, they realized it was a seismic shift in policy that would threaten the foundation of biomedical research in the United States.
Reforms to the indirect-costs policy had been debated over the years. There had long been an argument that the cost of helping universities and medical centers pay for “facilities and administrative costs” had gotten out of hand. Indirect rates were sometimes 50 percent or higher, meaning that a research grant supporting a $100,000 scientific project would come with another $50,000 in indirect funding.
The notice made several references to an analysis from a Heritage Foundation white paper, titled “Indirect Costs: How Taxpayers Subsidize University Nonsense.”
As NIH officials worked to post the notice, HHS officials grew impatient with every passing minute. Hurry up, they demanded, according to multiple officials familiar with the events. The conflict was first reported by the Atlantic.
“We [NIH] had nothing to do with it, and this was a really totally inappropriate thing that was foisted upon us with no warning,” one official with knowledge of the notice said. A change like this typically would have been carefully reviewed for weeks before it was posted.
It went live on the NIH website in about an hour.
Many universities responded that they would not be able to cover the cost of hosting major scientific research or experiments with only 15% of the overhead covered.
The cap of 15 percent on indirect costs was temporarily halted by a court as well.
An internal memo that same day from the office of general counsel… stated, in bold font: “All payments that are due under existing grants and contracts should be un-paused immediately.”
But a day later, nothing had changed.
“We have (like you all) been struggling with specific issues that would benefit from discussion on Thursday — even if we don’t have firm guidance,” NIAID Director Jeanne Marrazzo wrote in an email to other leaders on Feb. 11. Among the issues: “When can we anticipate being able to issue awards?”
In a leadership meeting that week, officials discussed an alarming new legal concern: The indirect-costs cap NIH had posted on Friday could put staff at risk of violating the Antideficiency Act, according to multiple people present for the discussion. The law prohibits federal agencies from spending federal funds in advance or in excess of an appropriation.
Leaders were concerned that individual grant managers could face criminal charges for doing their jobs…
With veteran leaders… gone, NIH scientists braced for mass firings as the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Agency implemented a plan to terminate probationary employees across the government. On Feb. 14, Valentine’s Day, more than a thousand such employees at NIH awaited their fates. Some received a chilling email:
“You have been identified as an employee on a probationary period and may receive a letter today from HHS informing you that you will be terminated and/or placed on admin leave.”
The wait proved excruciating. The termination notices didn’t arrive until the weekend.
The agency reeled from losing nearly 1,200 NIH staff in the government-wide firing of probationary workers. So rattled were employees that many believed a rumor that all the institute’s leaders were about to be fired, a total decapitation of NIH bosses. That didn’t happen….
Thousands of grant proposals from outside scientists, often representing months of work, were stuck in the pipeline — essentially freezing the future of American science. Through an arcane bureaucratic pause, dozens of meetings that are key parts of the review process were canceled that week.
Then came the Musk email, asking people to list five things they did last week. Then came the email telling people to ignore the previous email. Then came the same Musk email: respond or quit.
Dr. Francis S. Collins, the eminent former director of NIH, announced that he was resigning from the laboratory where he had worked for almost four years.
The Boston Globe reported that NIH had abruptly terminated grants at mid-point in Massachusetts and across the country.
In an unprecedented move, the National Institutes of Health is abruptly terminating millions of dollars in research awards to scientists in Massachusetts and around the country, citing the Trump administration’s new restrictions on funding anything related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, transgender issues, or research that could potentially benefit universities in China.
The sweeping actions would appear to violate court rulings from federal judges in Rhode Islandand Washington, D.C., that block the Trump administration from freezing or ending billions of dollars in government spending, said David Super, a constitutional law expert at Georgetown Law, who reviewed some of the termination letters at the Globe’s request.
In a related case brought by an association of higher education officials that specifically challenged Trump’s various DEI executive orders, a federal judge in Maryland twice over the past month blocked the administration from terminating funding, saying in his most recent decision the restrictions “punish, or threaten to punish, individuals and institutions based on the content of their speech, and in doing so they specifically target viewpoints the government seems to disfavor.”
Super added that the termination letters are also “unlawful” because the NIH is imposing conditions on funding that did not exist at the time the grants were awarded.
Chaos? Disruption?
It’s fair to say that the masterminds behind this fiasco are either stupid or malevolent or both.
Diane Ravitch's blog 