- The National Institute of Health, the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, fired 1,200 employees as part of the Trump administration’s cost-cutting bureaucratic overhaul. Current and former NIH employees told Fortune the firings and freezes have disrupted workplace productivity and jeopardized the careers of the terminated scientists, who have scant options for appeal or private sector job opportunities.
Katrina Le Blanc spent Valentine’s Day evening refreshing her email on her work computer, waiting to be fired.
She began her job as a policy analyst at the National Institute of Health’s Institute for Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Denver last June, and was a probationary employee. Her supervisor had warned her that managers were being asked to submit lists of probationary staff to the Office of Personnel Management for firing—a “looming dark cloud” hanging over her institute since early February, she said.
OPM, which reports to the White House, sent out a memo on Jan. 20 asking agencies to send in a list identifying all probationary employees. About three weeks later on Feb. 14, OPM requested agencies terminate probationary workers by Feb. 17.
Le Blanc had heard and read about other agencies getting rid of scores of workers—and sure enough, just days before Feb. 14, Le Blanc’s supervisor told her to pull her personnel file information, which included documentation needed to claim unemployment, just in case she received bad news.
On Valentine’s Day, lab leadership pulled all their employees into a meeting to relay the update: They had received word from the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, that all probationary employees were on a list, and the majority would be axed.
Then the waiting began.
“Leading up to everything that evening, there was still a part of me that was like, ‘Well, you know, maybe there's a chance it won't be me,’” Le Blanc told Fortune. “Then as the night went on, that began to dwindle and dwindle and dwindle.”
By the time she received the email outlining her termination on Feb. 15, Le Blanc was numb. “It was kind of like going through motions that weren't really happening to me,” she said, describing the five stages of grief.
Le Blanc emailed her colleagues her best wishes and farewells before losing permissions to her accounts on Feb. 18, leaving her with few coworkers with whom to make sense of the firing, and few hopes of finding another job that aligned with her niche research background or that had much meaning to her.
Le Blanc—who has a PhD in molecular medicine and has worked for nearly 16 years in public health—was one of about 70 people in her neurological disorders department and of nearly 1,200 probationary employees in the NIH axed as a result of President Donald Trump’s sweeping firings, which the president and his backers justify as an effort to cut back on government spending. Those NIH workers—from chiefs of staff to recent PhD graduates to program directors—are among 30,000 federal employees swiftly terminated in the first months of Trump’s administration, Axios reported.
Along with the firings, the NIH announced billions of dollars in cuts to biomedical research. The agency said slashing funding for “indirect” research costs would save it $4 billion annually. At the direction of the White House, the NIH also pulled funding for research pertaining to transgender people and diversity, equity, and inclusion in the scientific workforce, as Nature first reported. Grants for studies on climate change and a funding allotment for Chinese universities also came under scrutiny.
The NIH, the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, oversees nearly $48 billion in research conducted by about 300,000 scientists. The research carried out there has helped develop artificial organs, vaccines, cancer interventions, and therapies to help kids with nut allergies down spoons of peanut butter. Its research is also crucial to private-sector innovation: The agency has funded and is assessing the efficacy of Apple Watch’s ability to detect atrial fibrillation, a stroke warning sign, for instance.
Federal workers at the NIH, many of whom have doctorates and years of training in specialized fields, worry about more than just losing vital disease research. They say their research is hyper-specific and that finding a private-sector job would require them to find positions that are approximations of their expertise, or ones for which they are overqualified. While some are pursuing appeals and lawsuits, or holding out hope they will be reinstated, they also doubt their ability to do science in a work environment beset by waves of chaos. Even if a job was waiting for them on the other side of the mass firings, some aren’t so sure they’d take it back.
“A lot of people are starting to be like, ‘this was my dream job, and I don't want to go back to it,’” Le Blanc said. “And I'm kind of getting to that point, too.”
‘Psychological torture’
Learning about her fate through political announcements and Elon Musk’s social-media posts was “psychological torture” to Le Blanc.
She said her supervisor tried to soften the blow of her eventual firing. He told her management was required to cite a reason on termination letters for the firings: either performance, or misconduct. Management chose performance, but her supervisor said there was no truth in the selection. Le Blanc told Fortune she received a glowing review just weeks prior to her termination. Fortune viewed the performance review of another probationary NIH employee who was fired for performance reasons and saw she received a score indicating she exceeded expectations.
Le Blanc still remains in a liminal space in some regards. Her firing was effective on March 14, according to her termination letter viewed by Fortune, but she is unable to access any accounts or complete any work. She still has her government ID badge and computer and has not heard anything from human resources. When she calls HR, she said, she is told the mailbox is full. Le Blanc said she is still getting paychecks and cannot accept any new employment until after March 14.
But the mass firings have disrupted NIH’s research, according to other workers. An employee in a lab developing brain-computer interfaces said her lab’s principal investigator (PI)—who has “Title 42” designation, which requires his contract be renewed every few years—was put on unpaid leave last month before being reinstated this week by the acting NIH director.
During his leave, the lab’s equipment and specimens, which include a couple hundred mice regulated by animal welfare body the American Association for Laboratory Animal Science, were overseen by new personnel, often a member of another lab juggling their own team’s responsibilities. “People who are not super familiar with our work now have to be suddenly in charge of our animals,” the anonymous employee, whose identity is known to Fortune, said in an interview.
Some workers have had their abilities to order lab material frozen and their paid travel to conferences cancelled, according to the employee. Other federal workers have complained Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency eliminated thousands of federal workers’ credit cards and capped spending on some cards to $1.
No ‘swift justice,’ but a protracted appeals process
Federal workers who are fired can appeal their dismissal to either the Office of Special Counsel (OSC) or the Merit System Protections Board (MSPB), a federal body charged with protecting federal workers from political retaliation or discrimination. Workers can allege they were subject to illegal discrimination or dispute charges of poor performance—but they need to move fast.
Le Blanc, like many of her former colleagues, appealed. She opted to submit a complaint through the OSC, which she said has less narrow jurisdiction than the MSPB for probationary workers. She argued the federal government needed to give a reason to fire probationary employees and failed to do so. But she expects her case to remain “in limbo.”
The “probationary” term used to describe fired employees is a misnomer, workers told Fortune. It typically applies to workers who’ve started a new job or changed job titles within the prior year or two—including many who were recently promoted, but have decades of tenure in their agency or the government, according to NPR. There are hundreds of thousands of these workers across the government, the outlet reported.
HHS, NIH, and OPM did not respond to Fortune’s requests for comment.
OPM spokesperson McLaurine Pinover has previously said, "The probationary period is a continuation of the job application process, not an entitlement for permanent employment.”
Though many employees have reviews saying they were high performers, a termination marked with a “poor performance” allegation is a death knell for future public-sector job prospects. The performance deficits cited in the firings are listed in a worker’s Standard Form 50 (SF-50), which remains in their personnel files and viewable to prospective employers within the federal government, likely jeopardizing their chances of getting a new public sector job, employees told Fortune.
The MSPB was non-functional during Trump’s first administration. Trump did not appoint the key board officials necessary for the body to reach the quorum required to hear employee appeals, and from Jan. 7, 2017 to March 2, 2022, the MSPB could not vote or review any petitions. Trump is using the same playbook in his second term: He fired Cathy A. Harris, one of the five heads of the watchdog group, in February. A federal judge ruled the action illegal on Tuesday.
The MSPB is currently functional. Trump fired OSC head Hampton Dellinger on Feb. 7, and Dellinger has decided not to pursue a legal battle against the president’s decision.
In the past two weeks, the MSPB has seen an avalanche of petitions. Five months ago, the board typically received about 100 petitions every week. From Feb. 16 to 22—the week following many terminations—1,804 petitions came in. The week after, it got 2,178 more, a 20-fold increase of its typical quota. To put the numbers in perspective, the petitions already received by the MSPB exceed the backlog it accumulated during nearly five years it was non-functional, which ended in March 2022.
View this interactive chart on Fortune.com
It’s crucial for an employee appealing their firing to do so within 10 days of their dismissal. That way, an employee could be eligible for back pay if their firing is deemed unjustified, according to Nate Brought, former director of the NIH’s Office of the Executive Secretariat, who resigned last month because he disagreed with the agency’s direction.
The lengthy appeal process is bad for both the government’s coffers and fired employees. Back pay accrues interest, which the federal government must pay, but fired federal workers who win their appeals may not have access to it for years.
“It's really a tragedy for the federal employees, because people don’t have any sort of swift justice for illegal firings,” Gregory McGillivary, a labor lawyer representing federal workers in a class-action lawsuit alleging privacy violations, told Fortune.
Notching legal victories
Other federal workers are seeking legal action through different channels. McGillivary and other labor lawyers argue the federal government's mass firings are illegal because reductions in force (RIFs) must follow a certain set of procedures, including dismissing term employees (those working on a fixed contract) before probationary employees, and giving workers 60 days’ notice.
The Trump administration has argued OPM did not order employees to be fired, but simply suggested it. "Asking is not ordering," Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelsey Helland said in court last month.
But some officials and judges have agreed with McGillivary’s reasoning. Harris, the MSPB chair, ordered the reinstatement of an estimated 5,000 to 6,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture employees who were fired after Feb. 13, saying she had “reasonable grounds” to believe the firing violated a law outlining required personnel practices, which can include “abuse of authority” or threats to public health or safety.
A federal judge in the Northern District of California ruled on Feb. 27 that OPM did not have the authority to fire federal employees outside its agency.
“The Office of Personnel Management does not have any authority whatsoever under any statute in the history of the universe, to hire and fire employees within another agency,” Judge William Alsup said. “It can hire its own employees, yes. Can fire them. But it cannot order or direct some other agency to do so.”
That particular ruling did not reinstate fired federal employees, but OPM did revise its guidance in an updated memo, saying each agency determines the firings of their own probationary employees.
It’s not yet clear what this means for Le Blanc. But other public-health workers, including about 180 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employees, were reportedly reinstated just two weeks after they were fired. The CDC personnel are from two fellowships: a two-year training for recent graduates interested in joining the public health workforce, and a lab program for professionals with doctorates.
‘A future disaster waiting to happen’
Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser joined 21 other attorneys general last month in a lawsuit against the HHS and NIH "for unlawfully cutting funds that support groundbreaking medical and public health research at universities and research institutions across the country." It’s a small consolation for Le Blanc, who believes Denver—a liberal tech haven nestled in purple state politics—has few meaningful job opportunities in public health.
Le Blanc weighed the benefits of being reinstated with the bleak prospects of finding a private-sector job.
“My husband was, like, ‘Would you go back with all of this?’” Le Blanc said. “If it was just the job, I totally would, but with the way the administration is, the quality of life would be probably terrible.”
For now, her agency is still under an order to slash headcount.
According to a memorandum sent by the Office of Management and Budget and OPM, which no longer appears on its website, agencies must submit by March 13 lists of full-time employees, including senior staff, that they can cut and state the costs those cuts would save.
Le Blanc asked herself, would she return to her lab only to risk being fired again?
But beyond trying to find ways to get a paycheck, workers are worried about the future of their science. Rehiring for labs can take years, one NIH employee told Fortune. Other employees work with young graduate students or fellows who, beyond having their contracts not renewed, are losing faith in scientific institutions.
“The NIH does not make advancements in biomedical research for Republicans or for Democrats or for Americans,” former NIH official Brought said. “The entire world benefits from what we do.”
“We are risking an entire generation of medical professionals, researchers, and scientists for petty political bullshit,” he added. “And it's a future disaster waiting to happen.”
If you're a federal worker with a tip, or if you'd like to share your experience, please contact Sasha Rogelberg on Signal @sashrogel.13.
