Reflections on the NIH Reduction in Force
Read quotes from current and former NIH workers, those impacted by RIFs and otherwise on the impact of the RIFs and what it meant to them and their life.
“Current fed. Thoughts on RIFs: what a HUGE waste of time and effort! For probies, some of the positions took months to years to fill with the right candidates. For those who had been here, the drain on institutional memory is significant. And the loss of expertise in specific communications areas, as an example, has only served to further degrade public trust in public health efforts.”
“A year after losing my job in the April Fool’s massacre, I remain angry about being robbed of the work I loved so much by a bunch of grifters and quacks.”
“It was a devastating day. Supervisors who lost all or most of their staff were in shock. Colleagues were in tears. These were not just people’s jobs, they were their careers, their life’s work, and their calling. These were not just people doing a job, they were highly skilled, trained, and dedicated professionals who served the public every day. These were not just our colleagues, they were our friends, our work family, and the people we relied on to accomplish a shared mission that we were all equally dedicated to. The reason for the RIFs was never articulated (except to traumatize the civil service) and critical functions were abandoned overnight and have still not been restored. I know that any of us would hire back any one of our RIF’d teammates in a nanosecond, either at the NIH or wherever else we have landed. ”
“In my role as a Lead Contracting Specialist at NCI, I was proud to support an important public health mission. The RIF wasn’t just a personnel action, but a life disruption. It affected my financial security, my confidence, and my trust in the system. A year later, I’m still working through the ripple effects of something that happened so quickly but changed everything. It wasn’t just a job to me; it was a commitment to public service that I no longer have.”
“Russell Vought’s indiscriminate RIFs stole a promising, talented employee from my group and in doing so interfered with my agency’s mission. He destroyed careers, and wasted or diverted taxpayer money away from critical public services to advance his extreme ideology. I will never forgive him for this and neither should the American people.”
“A year later, I still feel waves of grief – not only for what happened to me personally, but also, and especially, of the destruction to NIH and to science. I miss my colleagues, my work, the beautiful spirit and energy of campus. I don’t think I’ll ever stop missing it.”
“A year ago, my entire team and I were RIF’d. Here we are, April 1 again, and more than half of my former team is still unemployed or drastically underemployed. Including me. Depending on where these highly performing professionals were in their careers, it’s not an overstatement to say their lives have been radically altered. At 58, for example, there simply isn’t time to make up for what was taken. And it’s not just individuals and their families. Institutions like NIH are under sustained disruption and attack, institutions that are critical to the long-term health of this nation and the world. How do you just find another job when nearly your entire field was dumped into the private sector at the same time? A private sector that has contracted due to loss of federal funding. The market can’t absorb that. People mean well when they say, “you’re smart, you’ll get another job.” They don’t understand how that lands after a year. After a year of resume tailoring, networking, interviewing, and too many hours of toxic LinkedIn positivity, it’s not just frustrating. It’s heavy. It starts to feel personal, even when you know it isn’t. There’s no lesson here. Just a lot of talented former colleagues still trying to find a way back in while critically important work on behalf of the American people goes undone.”
“At least I know the money saved on public health went toward paying the signing bonuses of the people terrorizing my neighbors”
“For me, the worst part was the utter senselessness—when they RIFed my colleagues, they sent the message to everyone (including most people who were NOT directly affected) that they can bully all of us and hold everyone at the agency hostage. Their actions left people feeling powerless and too scared and exhausted to fight back. However, as we organize—through the Bethesda Declaration, 27UNIHted, with kindred spirits—we resist the sense of paralysis and stand up to the bullies. Deep in my heart, I believe reason, rule of law, and justice will prevail if we fight back on the senseless assaults. It is not easy, but giving up is not an option.”
“For me the RIF was less about a Reduction in Force and more about Realizing Insanity Flourished. As painful as it was and continues to be, I have picked up the shattered remnants of my life and sought to remake myself anew—even if in a space far less than what I had achieved. I fight now not to regain my old position or for money, but to preserve the sacredness of America’s rule of law and democracy. I fight so others can find fertile spaces to rebuild amid the devastation and dismantling of government services and functionality wreaked by the RIFs. I fight against insanity.”
“ Feb. 14. April 1. May 9. These dates haunt me. They aren’t the only moments of the last year where I sobbed, grieved, sat dumbfounded.
I am a career civil servant at the NIH. In 2025, Hundreds of my colleagues were RIFed; more took early retirement or lost their contract positions. Dozens were people I knew well and with whom I had accomplished important work to improve the health of all Americans and to disseminate research to audiences that needed it most. These were coworkers, friends, mentors, and mentees who constantly impressed me with their dedication, creativity, and drive. The losses to the American public are only just beginning to be realized. We are in uncharted waters. Yet here I swim, navigating with an internal compass informed by those relationships and our shared experiences. I strive to trust my gut and do the most good and the least harm as one of very few public affairs specialists not RIFed.”
“I’ll never forget the day I received my RIF letter. It felt unreal...a serious mistake. For years, I had earned top performance ratings across federal agencies and various supervisors, consistent 5s, the highest possible in government. And none of it mattered. I had truly believed that if you worked hard, stayed honest, and delivered results, the American dream would deliver and it did. But in an unforeseeable turn of events, merit didn’t count. A decade of dedication was erased overnight. I took the first job I could find. Since then, I’ve been working my way back, trying to prove myself all over again, despite already having done so...several times over my federal career. And still, I carry April 1st with me, like a cruel and painful joke, and sometimes don’t believe it’s still true. This wasn’t just a professional setback, it was a violation of American values.”
“We saw for months science and public health infrastructure crumbling around us. Getting RIF’d made it tangible. For me, it meant a loss of stability and putting on hold the dream career I had been working towards. It made me very grateful that I have no dependents, which was exponentially harder for some of my colleagues.”
“The end of my 22-year federal career was not simply the loss of a job—it marked the loss of my purpose in public service and the mission that has defined my life as a brain tumor survivor. After enduring a 10-hour brain surgery and a year of rehabilitation to relearn how to walk and speak, I made a deliberate choice: to dedicate my career to advocating for individuals facing life-altering diagnoses. My work was never just professional—it was deeply personal. I am driven by lived experience, by resilience, and by a commitment to ensure that no one navigating a catastrophic illness feels unseen or unheard. I profoundly miss conducting research that amplifies the needs, challenges, and voices of people diagnosed with cancer. That work gave meaning not only to my career, but to my survival.”
“April 1, 2025 was a heartbreaking day, watching colleague after colleague receive dismissal notices. The administration’s RIFs were targeted at those who had jobs of informing the public and Congress. They were essential members of the NIH community, not just because of their excellence and dedication, but because they helped make NIH transparent. That is why they are gone. It has nothing to do with efficiency, and everything to do with the administration controlling information.”
“The RIF took our federal jobs and yet we serve. We act on our constitutional oath and hold this Republican administration accountable for breaking the rule of law, ignoring policy and procedure, and harming the health of all Americans by muzzling science and abusing the power of the purse to withhold funds awarded to America’s best and brightest scientists. We serve each other—offering support, access to legal counsel and other services, and opportunities to peacefully resist. We are as resilient and strong as the citizens we serve. We are 27 UNIHTED.”
“Shortly after 6am the screenshots started pouring into the group chat. One RIF notice after another. One of my friends, a leader in our hospital with twenty years experience, sounded shocky in her texts, sending “oh my god” and “I don’t understand” over and over again. I frantically refreshed my work phone, barely waiting for it to load before yanking down on the screen to refresh again. Nothing. I texted my immediate team members. Nothing, though someone’s husband received a notice. I tried to act calm as I got my daughter out the door for the bus. She has autism and severe anxiety and I’m a single mom; I didn’t want her to realize what was happening. My notice never came. No one on my team got one. No one knows why. Eventually the RIFs were reversed for two other teams, but otherwise 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. We never received any announcements or lists of people who were RIFed. If you didn’t have someone’s personal contact information you had no real way of knowing what happened to them. For months we’d type people’s names into new emails, hoping they showed up as online, or, failing that, hoping they at least had an out of office so we could stop wondering. I miss my friends. I miss having people to problem solve with. I miss how they made my work better and stronger through creativity and feedback and ideas they’d tried. 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.” It is so lonely. As we come up to the RIF-iversary I am getting increasingly tense. I feel like a guitar string that’s too tight and being tightened ever further. It’s hard to focus on my work, and I’m having trouble sleeping more than a few hours at a time again. I’m irrationally scared they’ll change their minds and RIF my whole team. My friends have been having a terrible time finding jobs; while they have decades of experience, strong performance, and awards, the market is glutted. If I lose my job, I will have no income to support my family.
We knew the RIFs were coming and we suspected our role would be one of the ones cut. They told us almost a week prior that it would be “any day now.” I was working on a resource to help my institute manage the stress of change and grief; because of the particular work my institute does, the impact of stress could be devastating not just to the health of our people, it could destroy our ability to achieve our scientific mission. I was afraid I’d be RIFed before I could present it, and I worried about our people and the impact on our science. So I frenetically worked to finalize my resource and record a presentation of it so my coworkers could make the most of it even if I was gone. I finalized the recording the evening before the RIFs. I presented it live to my whole institute the next day, just hours after accepting that my notice was maybe not coming after all. I had to change my talking points to bid farewell to my colleagues and friends who had just lost their jobs.
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“Being RIF’d on April 1, 2025, was one of the most devastating and life-altering experiences I have ever endured. After dedicating over 20 years of service, I was suddenly faced with the loss of my career, my financial stability, and my access to healthcare—all at once. The timing and circumstances made the situation even more difficult to process, leaving me feeling shocked, overwhelmed, and deeply uncertain about my future.As an employee over the age of 50, already working under a reasonable accommodation, the impact of this decision felt especially severe. I was just months away from becoming eligible for retirement benefits I had worked toward for decades. Instead, I was forced into a position where I had to consider significantly reduced pension options, which felt both unfair and disheartening after such long-term commitment and service. The loss of healthcare has been one of the most frightening aspects of this experience. At the time, I was actively undergoing cancer treatment and managing other serious medical conditions. The thought of not being able to afford necessary care created an overwhelming sense of fear and vulnerability. Healthcare was not just a benefit—it was essential to my survival. Beyond the financial and medical concerns, the process itself left me feeling abandoned and without support. With no access to Human Resources or appropriate points of contact, I had no clear guidance, no answers, and no one to turn to for help. This lack of communication only added to the emotional toll, intensifying feelings of isolation and distress during an already traumatic time. Professionally, the uncertainty of finding new employment at this stage in my life has been daunting. Facing the possibility of age-related barriers in the job market while trying to maintain basic life necessities, including my mortgage, has added significant stress and anxiety. Although, I was hired back in my same role, this experience has been a deeply destabilizing event that has affected my health, my financial security, and my sense of stability. The emotional and psychological impact has been profound, and the consequences continue to affect my daily life as I constantly wonder with every email, will this happen again”