Employees at the National Institutes of Health who formerly worked at the agency’s Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office were suddenly put on administrative leave Tuesday, according to three sources with knowledge of the situation.
The office, which was started in 2015, had seven full-time employees. In December, all of them were reassigned to other offices within the NIH in advance of the second Trump administration, which was expected to dismantle the office. The employees were given little choice in the matter, one NIH scientist with knowledge of the situation said.
On Tuesday, those same seven people were put on administrative leave indefinitely. The notice that employees were being put on administrative leave came “without warning or explanation … leaving them blindsided and disheartened,” Brittany Charlton, the founding director of the LGBTQ Health Center of Excellence at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said in a statement.
An NIH email reviewed by STAT notes that there is no disciplinary reason for the leave and does not provide an end date. While on leave, employees receive full pay and benefits.
It was only days after President Trump’s inauguration that the NIH took down pages for the Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office and its Sexual & Gender Minority Health Scientific Research Group. Those pages have not gone back up. In recent weeks, the CDC has confirmed it will no longer process transgender identity data, and the NIH has terminated some ongoing grant funding for research focused on LGBTQ+ populations. The moves are in line with the administration’s stated objectives to withdraw federal support for what it calls “gender ideology.”
It’s unclear why employees who were previously part of an office that functionally no longer exists would be put on administrative leave. Neither the NIH nor the Department of Health and Human Services immediately responded to STAT’s request for comment. One source with knowledge of the situation speculated that the move was simply punishment for having done this work.
“I am shocked and surprised it took them six weeks” after the inauguration to take action against these employees, the NIH scientist said, having assumed these employees’ prior assignments might have been uncovered sooner. The email STAT reviewed, sent on March 4, was dated Jan. 24.
One source with knowledge of the situation emphasized that the chaos federal workers have been dealing with has been traumatic.
“Their work changed the lives of our community by aligning LGBTQ health issues with national research goals, guaranteeing that all communities receive the attention they deserve,” Charlton, who has collaborated with SGRMO employees and receives a lot of funding from the NIH, said of the office’s former employees.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated when the email to NIH employees was sent.