By Kritika Agarwal
Over the last few days, the Trump administration has fired thousands of probationary federal employees, including at the nation’s premier science agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
As The Washington Post reported, “the firings have targeted new hires on probation, who have fewer protections than permanent employees, and swept up people with years of service who had recently transferred between agencies.” Probationary employees have limited rights against dismissal. Despite receiving termination notices that cited performance issues, “many of those fired had just received positive reviews, or had not worked in the government long enough to receive even a single rating,” The Post noted.
It is unclear at this point which employees in which exact positions have been laid off and how those job functions will be covered going forward. As a reminder, President Trump issued an executive order earlier this month asking the Office of Management and Budget to create a plan requiring agencies to “hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart.”
Cutting probationary staff disproportionately impacts young investigators and early-career scientists – the very people who are critical to sustaining the future work of federal research agencies and who perform lifesaving and transformative research.
Further, as AAU Senior Vice President for Government Relations and Public Policy Toby Smith told Inside Higher Ed, the cuts “are also adversely affecting important agency functions, such as support for research security at universities.”
He said: “Cutting key research security offices at the NSF and NIH will make it more difficult for universities and our science agencies to implement new congressionally mandated research security requirements aimed at protecting sensitive information and data from competitors at a crucial time when we are trying to stay at the forefront of global scientific leadership.”
Several lawsuits are currently in progress challenging the administration’s attempts to reduce the federal workforce. While some initial rulings have gone in favor of the administration, multiple legal challenges are still active and are pending further court decisions.
Below is the current state of play across a few science agencies as of publication.
The National Institutes of Health: Reuters reported on February 16 that the Trump administration has terminated 1,165 workers at the NIH, or “around 6% of the 20,000 people” employed by the agency. NPR reported that “offices involved in reviewing and administering grants to researchers outside the agency, such as at universities and medical centers, were hit hard” by the layoffs. The firings at the NIH are part of a larger effort across the Department of Health and Human Services to reduce the federal workforce.
Earlier this month, internal emails notified NIH staff that the agency’s second-in-command leader, Lawrence A. Tabak, was retiring immediately and that Michael Lauer, deputy director of extramural research for the agency, was also leaving. Lauer and his Office of Extramural Research led many of the research security and integrity investigations at the NIH and were playing a key role in the implementation of new research security requirements at the agency. The Trump administration also fired Renee Wegrzyn, director of the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The administration has not yet named a successor.
In related news, Nature reported on February 20 that NIH has suspended nearly all meetings of groups that review grant proposals and determine whether to fund or renew them. Nature noted that the Trump administration has barred the agency from publishing notices of the meetings in the Federal Register as required by law and canceled many of the meetings that had been scheduled previously. The meetings cancelations, in addition to the layoffs, could cause a significant backup in research funding. According to The New York Times, “federal research funding to tackle areas like cancer, diabetes and heart disease is lagging by about $1 billion behind the levels of recent years,” because of disruptions at the NIH.
National Science Foundation: On February 18, the National Science Foundation terminated 168 probationary employees, or about 10% of its workforce. According to NPR, “Many of those fired were program officers, who manage research programs by evaluating grants, pulling together research panels, and making decisions about which grants to fund.”
The firings included NSF employees who were permanent hires, but who had been reclassified as probationary in January, NPR reported. According to Politico, the agency also fired “all of its experts, a class of contract workers who are specialists in the niche scientific fields.”
NASA: CNN reported that the world’s leading space agency “may have sidestepped the sweeping layoffs it was expected to implement.” NASA told CNN that it had worked with the Office of Personnel Management and come to a determination that terminations for probationary workers will be “performance-based or voluntary in accordance with agency policy.” The agency had been expected to terminate about 1,000 probationary workers.
Nevertheless, the agency recently lost about 5% of its workforce because of employees accepting the administration’s “fork in the road” deferred resignation offer.
Kritika Agarwal is senior editorial officer at AAU.