27 UNIHTED / NIH Vigils Newsletter 8/23/26

Written By Cara AB

Hi NIH Vigilers and 27 UNIHTED Community,

“Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterward.” — Vernon Law, award-winning pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates

Here are the tests and lessons coming out this week:

Vigil “Auntie” News 

- The Good -

Federal vaccine policy moves backward; science doesn’t

In a praiseworthy rejection of the president’s new executive order, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services has announced that its childhood vaccine recommendations, school requirements, and exemption processes will remain unchanged.  The state will continue following its existing Standing Recommendation, which directs clinicians to the immunization schedule developed by the American Academy of Pediatrics and endorsed by 12 major medical organizations.  Michigan officials said there is no new evidence supporting a change to the current schedule and specifically defended the long record of safety and effectiveness for combination vaccines such as the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.  That reassurance comes as Michigan is seeing increases in measles, whooping cough, and other vaccine-preventable diseases.

Meanwhile, messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine technology—the same platform Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly criticized while the administration cuts hundreds of millions of dollars from mRNA vaccine projects—just reached a major milestone in cancer treatment.  Moderna and Merck reported the first successful late-stage trial of a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine.  The treatment is custom-built around mutations found in each patient’s tumor, training the immune system to recognize those targets.  In 1,137 patients whose high-risk melanoma had been surgically removed, adding the vaccine to Merck’s Keytruda reduced cancer recurrence and spread compared with Keytruda alone.  Detailed results are still to come, but an earlier trial showed a 49% lower risk of recurrence or death after five years.

A course correction on infectious disease

Infectious diseases have declined to take the eight-year break previously suggested by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.  Former Surgeon General Jerome Adams clapped back at that idea in 2024, saying “Chronic diseases are important—but you can’t die from cancer when you’re 50 if you die from polio when you’re 5.”  With measles outbreaks, foodborne illness, and other infectious diseases demanding public attention, Dr. Adams is back at it urging the Trump administration to restore full FoodNet surveillance and strengthen risk-based food inspections, fill vacant leadership positions at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and reaffirm vaccine safety and effectiveness.  He succinctly summed up the need to rebalance our national health priorities: “you cannot effectively focus on chronic diseases while you're being repeatedly overwhelmed by acute infectious outbreaks.”

There was also welcome movement from NIH on infectious disease progress this past week.  The agency has reversed its ban on funding new research projects in South Africa, reopening opportunities for scientists in a country that has long been a global leader in HIV and tuberculosis research.  Lifting some of the NIH restrictions that have disrupted research programs, cut jobs, and threatened clinical trials has raised cautious hope for moving new studies forward.  An important caveat: NIH simultaneously excluded South African scientists from Fogarty International Center research-training and career-development grants, cutting off a pipeline that has helped train generations of African researchers.

More Good News:

  • In a good showing for public feedback, NIH received nearly 3,300 responses to its proposed cap on simultaneous research project grants, with 40% opposed, 32% expressing mixed views, and 27% in support.  Respondents raised concerns about impacts on team science, mentoring, scientific merit, and unintended incentives, and NIH says it will consider the feedback in its next steps.

- The Bad -

Federal funding for research continues to hit political roadblocks

Hundreds of other NIH awards are being held in limbo after clearing grants management review, sitting in a category known as “Status 19.”  By this point, they have gone through the entire scientific review process, including peer review, staff analysis, second-level advisory council review, sign-off from senior staff up to the Institute or Center (IC) director level, and programmatic and financial oversight.  Normally, at that point an award is received and work can proceed.  Now, grants are subject to additional screening by NIH and HHS leadership for alignment with administration priorities— a step NIH career staff describe as unprecedented.  NOTUS reports delays of weeks to months affecting research on maternal health, dementia, contraception, and opioid use, with some grants flagged over terms such as “equity,” “diverse,” and “underrepresented.”  The Guardian has also covered the outright cancellation of at least three active NIH awards for ongoing research projects at Emory and the University of Pittsburgh.  These studies were investigating social factors, including racial discrimination, that contribute to Alzheimer’s disease risk and brain health.  The awards were renewed in June with new termination terms and conditions—then abruptly cancelled in July.  We’ll be watching whether these terminations represent early “test cases” for a new legal runaround to cancel active awards that run afoul of administration preferences.

NIH-funded researchers are hardly alone.  Fiscal year 2025 was already a low point for National Science Foundation (NSF) funding, and now Nature reports it will fund even fewer awards in fiscal year 2026—the lowest number in more than four decades.  An earlier investigation by Science found hundreds of basic-science program budgets were cut by 20% to 30% or more, contrary to congressional appropriations language that specified that NSF should not reduce spending in any directorate by more than 5% relative to 2024 levels (excepting STEM Education).  Meanwhile, over $1 billion of its ~$8 billion budget has been held in reserve, with some of those funds directed toward a White House Grand Research Challenge Project.  The Education Directorate and the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate were hit especially hard, with no new awards so far this fiscal year in sociology, archaeology, political science, economics, or geography.  “I don’t think they’ve realized yet that there’s no awards,” one NSF staff member told Nature of researchers in those fields.

Apparently at Harvard, which has been a frequent target of the Trump administration, grants do not have to be formally terminated for federal support to disappear.  The New York Times reports that Harvard is receiving substantially fewer new and continuing NIH research awards and experiencing significant delays in ongoing funding.  The Times documents a clear 18% decline in funding relative to the Biden era, but reports that researchers and university leaders are often left in the dark about why individual grants are being delayed, reduced, or rejected.  The paper suggests that this subtler funding attack may be harder to challenge in court.

In the wake of all these funding cuts and political bottlenecking, The Wall Street Journal suggests that scientists are increasingly turning toward foundations and industry to maintain their labs.  However, while nonprofit and private-sector funding might serve as a temporary stopgap, it is woefully insufficient to replace the load-bearing role of federal funding for academic and basic research.  Universities are therefore cutting Ph.D. admissions and hiring, labs are reducing staff and trainees, and researchers are delaying or scaling back projects.

More Bad News:

  • Science is reporting on community concerns that NIH’s proposal to generate “secret scores” on grant applications while reporting out categorical top/middle/bottom peer review assessments will reduce transparency, open the door for more political interference, and move decision-making further away from scientific merit with potential “disastrous consequences for American science.”

- The Ugly -

NIH autism initiative puts researchers under a political spotlight

Scientists receiving funding through NIH’s $50 million Autism Data Science Initiative say the unusually high-profile program brings a “big spotlight” to their work as the administration pushes for answers about autism’s causes and treatments.  Researchers told Science they are navigating heightened public and political attention while trying to preserve scientific rigor in an area already vulnerable to misinformation and pressure.  The high profile of anything regarding autism in this political climate needs care to navigate.  Immediately after a White House press conference promoted leucovorin, a folic acid analog, as a potential treatment for some autism symptoms in September 2025, there was a 46% increase in pediatric prescriptions.  This result is concerning because no new clinical evidence was presented about the long-term safety and effectiveness of the drug; in fact, there is only limited preliminary data that it even works for autism at all.  Even more concerning, the NIH’s new maternal and child health institute director is the co-founder of a for-profit company that helps families with autistic children gain access to leucovorin treatment (see Leadership watch below).

More Ugly News:

  • Former National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) senior adviser David Morens pled guilty to conspiring to defraud the United States by using personal email and other means to hide federal records related to COVID-19 research funding and evade public-records requirements.  Morens faces up to five years in prison; former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci has not been accused of wrongdoing in the case.

  • A former Department of Justice (DOJ) attorney assigned to an HHS-linked antisemitism task force alleges officials pursued funding freezes and settlements against universities despite incomplete investigations or, in the case of Brown University, no finding of a Title VI violation.  Lawyers for the whistleblower cite “predetermined outcomes without factual or legal support” and “disregard for the law and Constitution”; the disclosure has been filed with the DOJ and HHS inspectors general and the Office of Special Counsel.

Science Interrupted

What We’ve Lost: Skilled employees to run the federal government

It turns out that firing people does not make the work they did disappear.  It leaves someone else—often with minimal relevant training or experience—to pick up the pieces, or lets those tasks lie fallow in an endless loop of pass-the-buck.

An Associated Press investigation out this week highlighted dozens of zombie programs at the CDC: funded by Congress but effectively dormant because their workers were laid off or placed on leave.  They include work on Alzheimer’s disease, smoking prevention, epilepsy, sickle-cell surveillance, overdose prevention, maternal health, and rape prevention.  CDC’s $41 million Alzheimer’s initiative, for example, has no one staffing it.

Concern 5 of the Bethesda Report documents the same problem at NIH.  More than 4,400 employees left between January 2025 and April 2026, taking specialized knowledge in grants management, contracting, planning and evaluation, communications, human resources, clinical oversight, and other functions that keep the $48 billion research agency running.  At one Institute, grants-management personnel fell so low that employees estimated they could issue only ~5% of the usual new awards.  At another, managers filled in for property-management staff eliminated in a reduction in force (RIF) but lacked sufficient knowledge of the equipment-tracking systems even to replace broken laptops.  Elsewhere, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) work was redistributed among the remaining staff, pulling them away from their actual jobs.  

These consequences are piling up across government.  After losing more than 11,000 Taxpayer Services employees, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reassigned more than 1,000 workers to unfamiliar jobs; those detailed to taxpayer correspondence did not finish training in time for the 2026 filing season.  The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) was reducing its workforce without having assessed its personnel needs for disaster response.  FDA is now trying to replace a majority of its losses, while the State Department is recruiting for the same kinds of jobs it cut.  Despite all this turnover, the federal human resources agency, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), has taken a 35% staffing hit since December 2024 with a majority of departing employees taking at least a decade of experience out the door with them.

That is the part that gets lost when federal workers are reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet.  Government expertise lives in people—in knowing how systems work, why rules exist, what failed last time, who has the relevant expertise, and how to get something done when lives, taxpayer dollars, or scientific progress depend on it.  You can refill an org chart.  You cannot instantly recreate decades of institutional memory, relationships, and hard-earned judgment.

Reflection from the Community

“…every single person I used to collaborate with outside of my institute is gone.  I can’t benchmark practices anymore, or collaborate to come up with new, more effective ways of doing things.  Entire programs and initiatives are just...non-existent.  There’s no one left to run them…I can’t tell you the number of times my team has said, ‘well, ordinarily we would do xyz to solve this problem....but those people are all gone.’”

-Anonymous current worker (from “Reflections on the NIH Reduction in Force”)

Leadership Watch

NIH has selected pediatric neurologist John Gaitanis, M.D., to lead the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) beginning August 23.  He will oversee NICHD’s ~$1.7 billion annual budget and research portfolio spanning maternal and child health, reproductive health, and intellectual and developmental disabilities.  While Gaitanis has substantial clinical expertise, his advocacy for alternative treatments and therapies with little evidentiary backing and lack of practical qualifications for the job have raised concerns.  A recent Science article characterizes Gaitanis as having embraced the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) agenda—he spoke at the MAHA Institute’s Autism Round Table and Kennedy unsuccessfully put him forward for the reconstituted Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices last September.  He has also taken repeated, paid work as an expert witness on behalf of petitioners claiming neurological injuries from vaccines.  Beyond these ideological alignments with Kennedy’s public health positions, Gaitanis seems to have few practical qualifications for running an NIH institute.  Science found no record that he has ever received NIH funding or served as an outside grant reviewer and quoted Jeremy Berg, former director of NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences, as saying that there is “no evidence of even a rudimentary understanding of how NIH works (at least in the past) and clear evidence consistent with selection based on his political views.”

President Trump nominated White House domestic-policy adviser and physician Heidi Overton to be the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner following Marty Makary’s resignation.  Overton has been closely involved in administration health policy, including the recent childhood-vaccine initiative, and would inherit an agency that has lost more than 3,000 staff.  Republican Senator Bill Cassidy—chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions—said in a social media post that Overton’s involvement with the recent vaccine executive order is “almost disqualifying.”

In her first large staff meeting, new CDC Director Erica Schwartz acknowledged the staffing losses, burnout, and “leadership vacuum,” and promised to advocate for the agency but would only disagree with HHS Secretary RFK Jr. in private.  Given the administration’s very public disregard of objective science, however, Jeremy Faust of Inside Medicine argues this is not enough.  “If she disagrees with her superiors… she owes it to us—her actual employers, the American people—to convey those beliefs truthfully and transparently.  Otherwise, her presence at the CDC has no purpose.”

Upcoming Events

27 UNIHTED / NIH community events

Community Events

  • 8/24 - Duke Health Forum: What Truly Shapes Health?  Duke Global Health Institute will host a hybrid forum exploring the forces that shape health and health outcomes.  Attend in person or virtually.  Event details here.

  • 8/25 - Recognizing Civil Servants Through the Service to America Medals.  Partnership for Public Service/FedSupport webinar about the “Sammies,” and the upcoming nomination process.  Register here.

  • 8/27, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm - Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee meeting.  The rescheduled meeting will be held in person at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) Neuroscience Center in Rockville and online via NIH Videocast.  Advance registration is required for in-person attendance; registration link forthcoming.  Public comments are due August 20 (See Calls to action below).

  • 8/27, 2:30 pm - Help shape the NIDCR’s next strategic plan.  The National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR) will host a free virtual community webinar on its Request for Information for the FY27 to FY31 strategic plan.  Register here.

  • 8/28, 9:00 am to 3:00 pm - March on Washington: Defend the Vote.  At the Lincoln Memorial, the National Action Network, the King family, and partner civil-rights groups will rally around voting rights, civil rights, and economic justice.  Registration form here.

Calls To Action

Wondering how to write a public comment for the Federal Register?  Find commenting guidance at Regulations.gov.

*Ending Soon* Comment on NSF’s proposed grant-policy overhaul by August 24

NSF is accepting public comments on draft Guidance on Financial Assistance that would replace its current Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide.  Stand Up for Science warns that parts of the draft adopt key elements of the controversial grant rules proposed by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) before those rules have even been finalized.

*New* Comment on NIH’s sweeping new biosafety policy

NIH is seeking public comment on a draft policy that would replace its nearly 50-year-old recombinant-DNA guidelines with a more general one covering laboratory biomedical research involving specified biohazards.  Importantly, the requirements would also extend to non-NIH-funded research conducted at institutions receiving NIH funding.  Submit comments here by October 19.

Submit a comment about proposed changes to NIH grant review reporting

NIH is seeking public input on the proposed change to report application categorization as “most competitive,” “competitive,” and “not discussed” in lieu of final overall impact score.  Comments due by October 13.

Submit ideas for future NIH Common Fund priorities

NIH is seeking public input on cross-cutting biomedical and behavioral research challenges that could be addressed through workshops, pilot initiatives, or future NIH Common Fund programs.  Direct inquiries to: Common Fund Office, Office of the Director, cf-ideas@mail.nih.gov.  Responses are due by September 19.

Sign the Stand Up for Science petition supporting Dr. Fauci

According to Stand Up for Science (SUFS), it is likely illegal that the Republicans on the Senate panel referred the contempt resolution to the Justice Department without a full-Senate vote.  On August 7, 2026, SUFS published a petition to Congress to rescind the contempt referral to the Justice Department immediately.  Currently at 5,500 public signatures.

Endorse the Bethesda Declaration - One Year Later

A year after the release of the original Bethesda Declaration, NIH staff remain concerned.  The chaos of 2025 has been replaced with coordinated, systematic, institutionalized destruction in 2026.  If you share these concerns, be counted as a supporter of the Bethesda Declaration: One Year Later.  Learn more about the Bethesda Declaration Movement on 27 UNIHTED's Bethesda Declaration Hub.  Currently at 480+ signatures.

Impeach Vought

Add your name (or anonymous voice) on the petition to urge Congress to impeach Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russell Vought for unlawfully dismantling government services Americans rely on.  Learn more at www.impeachvought.com.  Currently at 2,570 signatures.

Stand with EPA scientists

More than 100 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) employees were fired for signing a Declaration of Dissent raising concerns about their working environment and recent policy changes.  Sign the petition to support these silenced staff members who were retaliated against for speaking out to protect science and public health.  Currently at 580 signatures.

Sign on for scientific integrity

The Union of Concerned Scientists has drafted a letter of support for the Scientific Integrity Act, which has been reintroduced to the Senate.  Let our leaders know that evidence-based decision-making is important to you by signing The Momentum for Scientific Integrity Action here.

Stand up for the National Science Board

On April 25, the Trump administration dismissed all sitting members of the National Science Board, an independent advisory group for the National Science Foundation.  Sign this open letter to Congress from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine (NASEM), asking for the reinstatement of fired members and appointments for all vacant positions.  27 UNIHTED has added its organizational endorsement.  Currently at 6,080 signatories and endorsements.

Reach out to your members of Congress about issues that matter to you.

Some possible topics:

Help the NIH community: Review a resume, host a job workshop, plan a happy hour, volunteer, and/or advocate with 27 UNIHTED.  Check out the links on our website to take action and volunteer. 

Wellness Weekly

Our somewhat serious community recommendations for self-care are:

  • Watch clouds move until your brain remembers it is not a spreadsheet

  • Eat something crunchy and call it sensory regulation

  • Go to the library and find the perfect spot to curl up with an actual book with pages

In solidarity,

27 UNIHTED and NIH Vigils

Cara AB
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27 UNIHTED / NIH Vigils Newsletter 8/16/26