STAT+: Five NIH institute directors and numerous lab heads ousted in unprecedented shakeup
Directors of five NIH institutes have been placed on administrative leave or offered new assignments
Directors of five National Institutes of Health institutes and at least two other members of senior leadership have been placed on administrative leave or offered new assignments since Monday, topping a list of hundreds of employees notified in the last 24 hours that they had lost their jobs as part of sweeping layoffs across federal health agencies.
The layoffs affected people across the NIH’s 27 institutes and centers, including officials who help guide how the world’s largest funder of biomedical research makes decisions about what diseases to study and what medicines to develop, as well as staff who made the organization operate day to day and communicated with the public.
Jay Bhattacharya, who officially took the helm of NIH on Tuesday, noted in an email to staff that the agency “had experienced a significant reduction in its workforce,” which he said “will have a profound impact on key NIH administrative functions, including communications, legislative affairs, procurement, and human resources, and will require an entirely new approach to how we carry them out.”
The cuts go beyond administrative personnel, though, affecting key scientists who were overseeing projects on sickle cell disease, neurodevelopmental disorders, and pandemic preparedness, among other areas of research.
Such large-scale shakeups are unprecedented at the research agency, where only the director of the NIH and one of its institutes, the National Cancer Institute, are political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the president. The other 26 directors of the NIH’s institutes and centers are not typically changed by a new administration.
