Already bruised by the first round of firings of federal workers by President Donald Trump’s administration, employees at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) faced more bad news. NIH’s 27 institute directors were told this week the agency must cut staffing back to 2019 levels, or at least 10% below its 2024 tally, according to two sources.
All told, according to an authoritative NIH source, the biomedical agency has in recent days lost about 1200 employees, or just over 5% of its workforce of some 20,000 staff, as part of the firings of “probationary” employees with less than 1 or 2 years in their current position. They range from administrative staff who handle outside grants to NIH lab managers, staff scientists, and tenure-track investigators. The blows have left employees shaken and wondering about the future.
“The firings and uncertainty that have happened even just up to now have set back NIH science significantly,” says one still-employed principal investigator on the NIH campus who declined to be identified for fear of retribution. “Ongoing projects have been disrupted, project plans are screwed up, people are looking for other jobs.”
The cuts hit hard in NIH’s in-house research program, which makes up about 11% of the agency’s $47.4 billion. With 1200 principal investigators, the intramural program is the world’s largest biomedical research institution, although that often goes unappreciated.
NIH this week sought permission to reinstate about 13 to 15 tenure-track principal investigators–young talent who had recently started up their labs. Several worked at a 4-year-old Center for Alzheimer’s and Related Dementias that has had strong support from Republican lawmakers. Also on the list of 150 probationary worker firings being appealed was the scientist in line to serve as the center’s acting head to replace its departing director, according to a memo obtained by Science.
Although researchers at NIH’s massive Clinical Center were largely spared after some last-second reprieves, it lost about 10% of lab technicians, an investigator there says. That will hamper research and delay routine blood tests needed to treat sick patients.
The firings come on top of other actions upending NIH’s intramural research including a communications pause, restrictions on purchasing, and the closure of a popular “postbac” trainee program that brings 1600 young scientists just out of college to the NIH campus to help run labs. The agency has also been declining in recent days to renew investigators hired under Title 42, a special mechanism that requires regular renewals.
The internal firings are disrupting NIH’s extramural program, which oversees $39 billion a year in grants to researchers at institutions across the country. An NIH program officer, one of the scientists overseeing grants in a specific area, said they had lost half of their peers in their division. That, they said, will “double the work” they do, which includes guiding investigators through submitting proposals through revisions and checking progress reports.
The scientist, who has spent much of their career at NIH, says, “I am heartbroken for what is happening to biomedical research and scared at what is going to happen to public health in this country and around the world as a result” of Trump’s actions.
The cuts to another key part of the grantmaking process, the Center for Scientific Review (CSR), which runs most peer-review panels, were less severe, according to a scientific review officer (SRO) there. Only three of the center’s 300 SROs were cut, they said, possibly because they are “essential” staff needed to run federal advisory committees. “CSR was relatively lucky, which is good because it impacts everybody,” the SRO said.
But extramural staff remain frustrated, along with biomedical scientists across the country, with a hold on study sections and institute council meetings, where grant applications are peer-reviewed. They remained inactive because the Trump administration has determined its communication pause extends to posting required notices in the Federal Register.
CSR is now waiting until just 24 hours before study sections are scheduled to cancel them, in the hope that an exemption will come through in time for them to resume, the SRO said.
The abrupt cancellations of the peer-review study section and advisory council meetings are frustrating for busy scientists who volunteer for them, the SRO added. “They choose to do this because they believe in it,” the person said. “It just seems very disrespectful.”
One policy expert in the NIH director’s office resigned in protest this week, partly over the freeze in meetings, saying the Federal Register issue is a stealthy way to not draw legal challenges. “I think that [the Trump administration] realized that the Federal Register is a choke point, and by strangling that choke point, you could prevent us and a lot of other departments and agencies from being able to comply in a way where you were not giving them direction not to comply,” Nate Brought told Science.
While NIH’s extramural staff wait on frozen reviews, a group within CSR continues to check grant proposals for terms such as “environmental justice,” “transgender care,” and “racial justice,” according to a memo obtained by Science. Staff must remove those proposals or grant components in order to comply with executive orders banning work on those topics. But NIH is leaving intact studies of health disparities, according to the SRO who spoke with Science. “NIH is trying their best to protect those things.”
Intramural scientists did end the week with a little bit of good news. Today, NIH announced its intramural scientists can attend and present work at off-campus meetings. They can also go back to serving as peer reviewers for journals, which had been stymied by the “communications” pause.
In a message to NIH employees today, acting Director Matthew Memoli acknowledged the difficulties and warned of more pain to come. “The last few weeks have been difficult for many of us, but we must prepare for further changes ahead,” Memoli wrote. “When this transition is behind us, NIH may look different, but our mission—to improve the health of all people through groundbreaking biomedical research—will remain unchanged.”
Memoli also tried to reassure staff that NIH has the support of Robert F Kennedy Jr., the lawyer and vaccine skeptic now serving as Secretary of Health and Human Services. He noted that in a speech to employees this week, Kennedy “spoke warmly about NIH” and recounted a childhood visit where he “admired NIH researchers.”
