THE National Health Institutes The hundreds of additional staff were dismissed, several current and licensed employees of the health agency, including its cancer research institute, told CBS News.
Friday evening, around 200 employees began to receive dismissal notices, said three people who spoke on condition of anonymity. This decision surprised NIH officials, since the ministry previously claimed No other cuts were planned at the agency.
“We thought that the worst was behind us, and we were passing by this new phase, and the carpet was just withdrawn from under us,” said a licensed employee.
An NIH spokesman did not comment why the director of NIH, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, asked for additional layoffs, referring to a survey at the Ministry of Health and Social Services, which oversees the NIH. An HHS spokesman said that after an exam, the ministry had informed the additional employees that they had been “also affected” by the layoff plan announced in March.
Less than 250 employees from the ministry received opinions, said the spokesperson. An HHS official said that “the same number of employees will be brought back to critical areas” elsewhere in the department.
Two people told them that the second cut cycle had been made as part of an effort to compensate for other scientists who were to be reintegrated, in order to comply dismissal Targets.
“The savings of these reductions will help redirect resources to critical programs and strengthen our ability to effectively serve the American people. The objective is clear: reducing waste and maximizing the impact of each dollar taxpayers,” said HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon in a statement.
Friday, around 50 employees at the National Cancer Institute of NIH, or NCI. They had worked in the institute Communications and public connection office supervise programs like the Cancer information servicewhich provides answers to doctors and patients on cancer and updates to databases summary Cancer information for health care providers.
The dismissal opinions one day came after the staff of this NCI communications office had met high -level leaders of the NIH, to discuss the development of plans to consolidate their staff in a new centralized communication arm through the agency.
While several communication offices at the NIH Institutes had been emptied during a first cycle of layoffs on April 1, the NCI team was spared. Only a handful of NCI staff members had been dismissed last month, two people said, especially in the Institute’s human resources teams.
“Leadership was transferring a process and some of our media relations in NIH, because they still received press requests, but they could not manage the volume of requests that took place,” said the licensed employee.