STAT+: Inside U.S. health agencies, workers confront chaos and questions as operations come unglued

Beyond the thousands of workers laid off and programs shuttered, the Trump administration’s remaking of the Department of Health and Human Services — in a matter of weeks — is now sparking basic questions about how parts of the agency and those it oversees can continue to function.

With bare-bones procurement departments to rely on and administrative staff axed, lab leaders at the National Institutes of Health are scrambling to buy food for the animals kept in their facilities. Some scientists have been hoarding and rationing the reagents that they have stockpiled. Because of imposed restrictions, for months they haven’t been able to purchase supplies like culture media to nourish cells or dyes to track experiments. For a brief period, one investigator reported not even being able to get anything that comes on dry ice; in the case of at least one institute, the entire warehouse department was laid off, briefly shutting down all shipments of various supplies.

“In the labs, they’re bartering,” said one NIH scientist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, as did most others interviewed for this story, for fear of retribution. “There are email listservs going through the NIH that normally are for things like announcing interesting papers or talks that are now 90% ‘Anybody have this reagent? One little bit of this reagent that I can use?’”

The chaos that NIH investigators are facing — which echoes reports seeping out of other HHS agencies under health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. —  suggests a major reckoning playing out inside the heart of the federal government’s health infrastructure. Collectively, when compounded across the $1.8 trillion enterprise, it points to a fundamental reshaping of how the department operates, and of what science and public health will look like in this country going forward.

In more than two dozen interviews with employees across HHS and its subagencies, staff described grappling with challenges that they say are more dire than a mere downsizing of the workforce might suggest. Many said they were unsure how long before the fraying of certain initiatives could turn fatal, risking programs that operate largely unseen by the public but that they insist protect lives.

One person used the word “existential” to describe the upheaval at HHS, at a time when the losses so far are still being tallied. Another observed: “We are really trying to hold things together with our bare hands.”

Continue to STAT+ to read the full story…