Many in leadership start getting fired at federal health agencies

Senator Pallone, director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, spoke to the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday (II): “Reassignment to the Indian Health Service is a massacre”

“[Sec.] Everyone who is paying attention knows that Kennedy is wrong in his claim that health care services won’t be harmed by the downsizing.

The ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, Frank Pallone, Jr., D-NJ, said during the oversight and investigations hearing that the Trump administration has launched an attack on the federal health workforce.

“The level of cuts at NIH I am hearing about today is truly mind-boggling,” wrote Jeremy Berg of the University of Pittsburgh, who served as the director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health, from 2003 to 2011, wrote NPR. ” I try not to be hyperbolic but this seems to be a massacre. … I do not know where this leads.

One of the employees at the agency said that they had a feeling that the mood was frantic. The person, who was not fired, asked not to be identified because of fear of losing her job.

Several other leaders have received the same offer. Shannon Zenk is the director of the National Institute of Nursing Research.

At least some directors were offered reassignments to the Indian Health Service, a division of the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that provides medical care to Indigenous people living in the United States. The agency that oversees the National Institute for Health is the HHS. “HHS proposes to reassign you as part of a broader effort to strengthen the Department and more effectively promote the health of the American people,” reads an e-mail to the directors that Nature has obtained. “This underserved community deserves the highest quality of service, and HHS needs individuals like you to deliver that service,” it says, offering reassignment to locations such as Alaska, Montana and Oklahoma.

Scott Gottlieb, who served as FDA Commissioner under President Trump, wrote on X Tuesday that the US will no longer be the first to access new drugs and treatments because of the FDA staff cuts.

Interviews with employees and officials at many of the agencies indicated that the Trump administration was issuing notices to thousands of staffers on Tuesday.

The layoffs were intended to reduce bureaucratic sprawl, according to the Secretary of HHS. He said that the organization was realigning with its core mission and his new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic.

“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, who served as President Biden’s COVID-19 Response Coordinator, told NPR in an interview.

“This will go down as one of the darkest days in modern scientific history in my 50 years in the business,” says Michael Osterholm, an infectious-diseases epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. “These are going to be huge losses to the research community.”

At the FDA, the entire team that handles communications for the agency lost their jobs, according to staffers who were among those fired. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation for publicly criticizing the administration. According to an HHS fact sheet, 3,500 FDA jobs are being eliminated. The FDA’s top vaccine regulator, Dr. Peter Marks, revealed on Friday that he’s been forced out.

Human Government: The Case against Human-Dumpty Oscillations at the National Institute of Health and Human Development (NIAID), NNIMHD and NNINR

“I am certain that this will be seen as a huge mistake by history,” he wrote. If I’m proven correct, I will be happy, but there is no good reason to treat people this way. It will be interesting to hear from the new leadership how they plan to put ‘Humpty Dumpty’ back together again.”

The directors of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities (NIMHD) and the National Institute of Nursing Research (NINR) were informed late on 31 March that they were being placed on administrative leave. Together, these leaders were in charge of US$9 billion in funding at the NIH.

When asked for a response, the NIH directed Nature to the HHS for comment. An agency staff member who was not authorized to speak with the press says that Renate Myles, the top communications officer at the NIH, was placed on administrative leave. The HHS did not respond to Nature’s queries by publication time.

In his first e-mail to agency staff members on 1 April, which was obtained by Nature, Bhattacharya wrote: “These reductions in the workforce will have a profound impact on key NIH administrative functions … and will require an entirely new approach to how we carry them out.”