By the time their spending accounts were reactivated on Thursday, some scientists at the National Institutes of Health said they were running on fumes.
They had spent weeks scrambling to keep their labs running amid spending freezes, firing rampages and the chaos and confusion brought on by both. They were reusing latex gloves in an effort to conserve supplies. They were borrowing, donating and sharing a long roster of crucial but dwindling reagents with one another, in email threads that had morphed into virtual bazaars. In interviews, several of them said they would have to close up shop in as little as two or three weeks if something didn’t change drastically, and soon.
The unfreezing of agency credit cards (what scientists there call purchasing cards or p-cards) is a welcome but insufficient reprieve from this spiral. It will restore at least some hope to a work force disillusioned by major changes under the Trump administration, but it will improve things materially only at the margins: For one thing, several other financial restrictions remain in place (and many of the people with the clearance needed to use the reinstated cards have been fired).
For another, much more chaos is still in the offing. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has ordered the N.I.H. to cut 35 percent of its $16.7 billion contract spending budget. If “contract spending” sounds like a code for bureaucratic waste, it is not. Scientists, research assistants and animal technicians are often funded through contracts. So are the clinical trial coordinators who process samples and monitor patient safety, the skilled machinists who maintain microscopes and mass spectrometers and M.R.I.s and the office managers who serve as the institutes’ de facto nerve centers.
“They don’t just order supplies and book travel,” one scientist, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters at the agency, told me. “They filter every request through a web of restrictions and regulations meant to keep N.I.H. compliant with federal laws. If we lose our office managers, everything falls apart.”
As if none of that were bad enough, people in the agency said the N.I.H. is also set to lose a majority of staff members who work on contracts on June 2, when the 60-day notice period (legally required for firings related to force reduction) concludes; the scientists I spoke with said all of those working for the scientific institutes had been fired.
Contracts are far more complicated than grants. They involve much more oversight and require greater expertise to manage. They are also far-reaching. In addition to everything they cover in-house, they also fund some $10 billion to $15 billion in outside (or extramural) research — including large clinical trials and long-term epidemiological projects like the Framingham Heart Study.
It’s anyone’s guess what happens when the people who know how to manage these complex and hugely consequential documents are gone. But it seems clear that you can’t have contracts if there’s no one to execute them (no one to make payments or authorize work or resolve disputes), and you can’t have an N.I.H. without contracts.
It’s unclear what help, if any, is on the way. The N.I.H.’s newly minted director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, seems to have been instrumental in restoring the purchasing cards, but he has not managed to stop the firing rampage.
After a lifetime spent asking big, complicated questions, what the scientists most want to know now is this: Why? What, truly, is the goal of so much cruel and clumsy destruction?
Efficiency is not being enhanced, nor is waste being eliminated. (If anything, it’s increasing.) American interests are not being protected. And the quest to cure diseases or improve human health is not being advanced.
So when it’s all over, if the crown jewel of biomedical research — the enterprise that gave us the human genome sequence, Covid vaccines and treatments for cancer and H.I.V. and obesity — has been destroyed, what will have been the point?
