The Cheyenne River Sioux Tribal Wellness Center is an Indian health service establishment in Eagle Butte, southern Dakota. This photo was taken in 2021, when the area was hardly affected by the COVVI-19 pandemic.
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The emails started to arrive late Monday evening.
“The Ministry of Health and Social Services (HHS) proposes to reallocate you in the context of a broader effort to strengthen the department and promote the health of the Americans more effectively,” said email. “A critical field of needs is in the indigenous communities of American and Alaska Indians.”
In the midst of the massive layoff of the Trump administration at the HHS, these reallocating emails have accelerated a apparent purge of direction to federal health agencies. The senior officials of different HHS parts were put on administrative leave with the possibility of moving to a new job in Alaska, Montana, New Mexico or other publications within the Indian Health Service (IHS).
“I have not seen it happening at all,” said a senior manager of the Ministry of Health and Social Services at NPR. The executive asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals from the administration.
William “Chief Bill” Smith presides over an organization that advocates the IHS on behalf of the tribes, the National Indian Health Board. “Any major change in leadership within the IHS should be made in full consultation with the tribal nations, as required by the law,” Smith wrote in a statement at NPR. “The tribal consultation is not only a procedural step – it is a fundamental responsibility of the federal government.”
“Absolute diagram”
The number of health leaders who have received the emails and the reasons for whom have been chosen remain vague. E-mail does not specify what will happen to those placed on administrative leave if it does not accept the offer.
HHS did not answer NPR questions about the scope of reallocation offers. NPR confirmed that nine managers have received the email from the reallow; There may be more.
“This decision displays the greatest lack of respect for the public service. It is clearly designed to force talented scientists and health experts to leave the government,” said Richard Beser, CEO of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, a non -profit -focused health philanthropy. “It is also an insult to health professionals from Indian health services who devote their lives to providing health services on tribal land.”
It is not known if someone has taken the offer or plans to take it.
“I am a career official. I worked for the Republicans and the Democrats,” said HHS director at NPR. “The public service is noble work, and the ability to serve our country and impact on whole populations simply by coming to work is a gift. There is therefore a sadness that comes with it.”
Connections with FAUCI
At the National Institutes of Health (NIH), some sources that spoke at NPR suspect that the objectives have been chosen as reprisals dating from the COVVI-19 pandemic.
Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who took the post of director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases after the departure of Dr Anthony Fauci, obtained the offer, according to an email obtained by NPR.
Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, the best nih bioethicist, as well as two other close to Fauci, according to a source that was not allowed to talk about the situation.
Fauci, who left the NIH in 2022, became a hero for many during the pandemic, but he was also vilified by criticism of the government’s response. Dr. Francis Collins, who also worked in close collaboration with FAUCI as director of the NIH, was recently forced to leave the agency.
The offer seems to be “an opportunity to try to say that they are not released – they are offered a new opportunity,” said Susan Polan, Associate executive director of the American Public Health Association. But that “does not seem to be the ultimate goal. The goal really seems to be to undermine leadership in these agencies”.
IHS used as “a pawn”
Polan spoke during a briefing last week by defenders of public health and civil servants denounced around 10,000 centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Food and Drug Administration, NIH and other agencies.
“The IHS needs are not met and it is used as a pawn in the forcing game of HHS staff to resign instead of being dismissed,” added Polan later in an email at NPR.
“It is a way to try to get people to leave,” added Dr. Philip Huang, director of Dallas County Health and Human Services, during the briefing.
The Indian Health Service provides crucial services and deserves to be sufficiently composed of the most qualified workers, Huang and other people during the briefing said.
The officials, who obtained the offer on Monday, March 31 or Tuesday, April 1, had until 5 p.m. on Wednesday, April 2, to respond to the offer, according to the email obtained by NPR.
Email is read, it’s Thomas J. Nagy Jr., Deputy Deputy Secretary of Human Resources at HHS.
Reassignment links
Nagy’s email gives civil servants the work options in a variety of places that are a mixture of states, cities and reservations. They seem to correspond to IHS zones, an official designationwith a few exceptions. This is the list of email:
- Alaska
- Albuquerque (New Mexico)
- Bemidji (Minnesota)
- Billings (Montana)
- Great Plains (Southern Dakota, North Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa)
- Navajo (Arizona, New Mexico, Utah)
- Oklahoma
“We would like to understand your preference in these potential reallowing opportunities,” said the email.
“More specifically, we would like to know which regions you would accept a voluntary reallocation and the order of your preference, if necessary, between the regions,” he said.
Health managers offered a transfer
According to sources that have shared information with NPR under the cover of anonymity because they are not allowed to speak to the press, officials in addition to Marrazzo and Grady who received the IHS realloring offer:
– Dr. H. Clifford Lane, Deputy Director of Clinical Research at the National Institute of Infectious Allergies and Diseases, which has long worked with Fauci
– Dr Emily Erbelding, Director of the Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases
– Renate Myles, communications director for NIH
– Dr. Eliseo J. Pérez-Astable, Director of the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Dés Désurities
– Shannon Zenk, director of the National Institute of Nursing Research
– Dr Diana Bianchi, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
– Brian King, director of the Food and Drug Administration Tobacco Products Center
IHS is a priority for RFK JR.
Indian health service was a Elon Musk’s Doge’s Doges CupsWhen 950 employees were dismissed in February. But the secretary of HHS, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., quickly intervened and said that all these staff members should be rehired. “The Indian Health Service has always been treated like the Rousse Rousse in the HHS,” Kennedy said at the time in a written declaration to ICT, a non-profit press organization that covers indigenous peoples.
A COVVI-19 vaccination event organized by the Navajo Area Indian Health Service in Gallup, New Mexico, in March 2021.
Cate Dingley / Bloomberg via Getty Images
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Kennedy announced that he would visit the Navajo nation during a Western trip Monday to Wednesday. Kennedy nicknamed him a “Maha tour” – referring to his slogan Make America Healthy Again. He will also go to Arizona and Utah and will meet tribes chiefs, although HHS did not share a specific route in a press release during the trip.
The Indian health service and all HHS divisions were ordered to reduce contract expenditure by 35%, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon, confirmed at NPR.
Dr. Georges Benjamin, Executive Director of the American Public Health Association, says that broader reductions in federal health programs also affect tribal communities. “When they cut subsidies or close CDC programs, they have also directly and indirectly reduced IHS programs,” he said.
Benjamin says that he does not think that the intention of the reallowing offers of NIH was to “injure or disaminate” IHS, but “take a person trained at clinical skills that did not practice clinically is generally not useful if the work is clinical or even a work as a clinical manager”. He added: “The most cynical point of view is that it is a way to bring the elderly to leave.”
Smith, which is the village of Valdez in Alaska and who chairs the National Indian Health Board, says that tribal leaders need the possibility of weighing on any change.
“We urge the Ministry of Health and Social Services (HHS) to respect this obligation and to engage in a significant tribal consultation before going ahead with any reallow,” Smith wrote in the press release.
The other federal health officials who have recently been forced to go out are Dr Peter Marks, who was the best regulator of the Food and Drug Administration vaccine.