A National Institutes of Health employee who has been publicly critical of the Trump administration’s health policies said she was placed on “nondisciplinary” administrative leave when she returned to work on Thursday after the government reopened.
The employee, Jenna Norton, said in a TikTok video that the move “was designed to scare and silence me.” Dr. Norton was a key organizer of “The Bethesda Declaration,” a scathing public letter issued in June to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, the N.I.H. director. The letter, signed by dozens of N.I.H. employees, denounced what it described as the degradation of the American medical research apparatus under President Trump.
“I was not given a reason for being put on leave, but I strongly suspect it is because I have been speaking up in my personal capacity about the harms that I’ve been witnessing inside the National Institutes of Health,” Dr. Norton, a program director at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, said in the video.
She added that she would “keep on sharing here the harms that my many friends inside the agency will be witnessing, I suspect, in the coming months.”
In a brief interview on Thursday night, Dr. Norton, whose work focuses on eliminating health disparities, said she was given no reason for the leave but was told that the directive came from the N.I.H.’s parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services. “They said it was nondisciplinary,” she said. “To my knowledge I haven’t done anything wrong.”
An H.H.S. official, who asked for anonymity to speak about a personnel matter, described Dr. Norton as a radical leftist and said she was put on leave because she was criticizing the administration when she was supposed to be working.
In a statement after the letter was released in June, Dr. Bhattacharya said, “The Bethesda Declaration has some fundamental misconceptions about the policy directions the N.I.H. has taken in recent months, including the continuing support of the N.I.H. for international collaboration.” He added: “Nevertheless, respectful dissent in science is productive. We all want the N.I.H. to succeed.”
Sheryl Gay Stolberg covers health policy for The Times from Washington. A former congressional and White House correspondent, she focuses on the intersection of health policy and politics.
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