“These hastily-executed NIH contract cuts will damage both ongoing medical research and clinical trials for diseases like cancer and dementia,” reads a letter sent from a group of “Concerned NIH Federal Workers” to a collection of Republican Senators this week and viewed by Splinter. “Patients depend on clinical trials supported by NIH for hope. There are lives at stake.”
The 35-percent contracts slash would amount to a $2.6 billion cut to NIH, the letter says. “Despite what the Trump administration’s political employees claim, there is no way to implement these cuts without damaging the NIH mission to understand biology and to understand, prevent, and treat disease and improve human health.” It points out that contracting is more complicated than just line items in a spreadsheet, and that ending any particular contract should involve a 12-month process and consultation with scientists, physicians, and other relevant experts in order “to prevent waste and damage to research.”
Meanwhile, even existing contracts are under fire, thanks in large part to the firing of the people responsible for managing them. In a message sent to National Cancer Institute staff on Monday and viewed by Splinter, leadership said that there is currently a $4.4 million backlog in purchasing; with many people in the NCI’s Office of Acquisitions fired, no one is there to execute those contracts and purchasing orders.
NCI staff were instructed to use a special “Urgent Emergency Purchase Form” in order to cut through the backlog. Emergency purchases include anything relating to patient safety or immediate patient care, as well as animal welfare, equipment failure or safety issues, and “protection of intellectual property.”
Impound appropriated money, slow or halt grant drawdowns, cut contracts with barely any planning or notice, fire the people who keep things running — taken together these will grind research both at NCI and NIH themselves and also at universities across the country to a halt. The NIH employees’ letter to GOP senators calls out Elon Musk’s and “the Trump administration’s fraudulently-named department of ‘efficiency'” role in all this as well: “Cancer research is not Twitter: it takes much longer to do cancer research work than to, for example, relaunch a subscription service while Twitter’s revenue plummets by 40%.”
The letter targets Republican senators — specifically sent to Senators Mullin, Capito, Cassidy, Collins, Cornyn, Blackburn, Tillis, Lankford, Tim Scott, Rick Scott, and Sullivan— because they have actual power to slow or stop the assault. It remains up for debate, of course, if there is a limit to what the Congressional GOP will tolerate. In addition to their letter, the NIH employees included quotes from each of those Senators touting NIH or the importance of cancer or other research; whether this is convincing enough to spur action from a party so thoroughly cowed by Trump and his rabid followers is an open question.
“If they are allowed to move forward, the effects these cuts will have on cancer and other cures will be newsworthy. And you cannot say you did not know,” the NIH employees wrote, calling on the Senators to pressure Trump, Musk, and HHS leadership to use a rational approach to contracts. “It would be effectively taking the side of cancer to do nothing to stop these contract cuts at NIH and HHS.”
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