Follow up on Blount Alzheimer’s Center Cuts.

Regarding the saga of the new administration terminating probationary employees at multiple federal agencies including NIH and the Center for Alzheimer's and Related Dementias (CARD), I found an interesting article when perusing the weekend edition of the Wall Street Journal. While the article isn't about NIH, the article does illustrate how the new head of the USDA is dealing with the staffing reductions in a rational manner.

Journalist Sierra Dawn McClain (assistant editorial features editor at the Journal) interviewed US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Brooke Rollins. Brooke took office on Feb 13, she calls herself "a true believer in trimming the bureaucracy." The article notes that Brooke was working with Elon Musk and laid off "nearly 6,000 probationary employees." On March 5, the Merit Systems Protection Board ("a quasijudicial office of the US Civil Service Commission"), ordered the USDA to reinstate the employees temporarily. Rollins indicated she had "reviewed the decision and is taking steps to comply."

Regarding the avian flu, McClain writes about "another challenge of the cost-cutting effort: Vital government services cost money too. … And sometimes hasty efforts to cut fat end up injuring muscle. Ms. Rollins admits she laid off key employees who were working on avian flu only to realize she needed their expertise. 'This is an imperfect process that has never been done before,' Rollins says. If the USDA lets go of a team it should have kept, 'then without hesitation, we admit our mistake, and we fix it.'"

The Senate has not yet confirmed the administration's nominee for the NIH, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (currently a health economist professor at Stanford University). At his confirmation hearing on March 5, AP reports that Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) "expressed deep frustration that turmoil at the nation's largest funder of medical research - mass firings and funding cuts and freezes - threatens the development of cures and new treatments for cancer, Alzheimer's disease and a host of other disorders." Bhattacharya indicated he had no part in the cuts, "and if confirmed as NIH's director, he would look carefully at the concerns to make sure researchers have the resources they need."

The website science.org, which includes many technical articles with titles like "ATF4 orchestrates Treg function in homeostatsis and obesity", published an article on March 13 titled "NIH reinstates some of its early-career scientists". The article states that "promising early-career NIH scientists who were fired last month as part of the purge of probationary employees learned yesterday that they have their jobs back." The acting NIH director appealed to his bosses at the Department of Health and Human Services. The bosses approved re-hiring 250 employees from the1200 probationary employees who were fired.

https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-reinstates-some-its-early-career-scientists