STAT+: NIH puts former Sexual & Gender Minority Office employees on administrative leave
After reassignment to other NIH jobs in December, employees of the Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office were recently put on administrative leave.
Employees at the National Institutes of Health who formerly worked at the agency’s Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office were suddenly put on administrative leave Tuesday, according to three sources with knowledge of the situation.
The office, which was started in 2015, had seven full-time employees. In December, all of them were reassigned to other offices within the NIH in advance of the second Trump administration, which was expected to dismantle the office. The employees were given little choice in the matter, one NIH scientist with knowledge of the situation said.
On Tuesday, those same seven people were put on administrative leave indefinitely. The notice that employees were being put on administrative leave came “without warning or explanation … leaving them blindsided and disheartened,” Brittany Charlton, the founding director of the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a statement.
