Perspectives from a Senior Staffer and NIH Loyalist: The Dark Side of NIH Leadership

Officials running the agency use the media to manipulate coverage and maintain control, often to cover up things they fail to deliver to the public.

9 minute read

The author of today’s piece is a senior NIH official who wished to remain anonymous to protect themselves from reprisals.

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As someone who works directly with the NIH Director’s office, I am dismayed by the disingenuous coverage of NIH in places like the New York Times and Science Magazine. Very little of what I read comports with my own experience and I am worried that scientists and the general public are getting a false view of the real problems inside the world’s largest funder of biomedical research.

Every large institution is fraught with palace politics, but today’s NIH is suffering from a deeply entrenched senior leadership in the director’s office that is plagued by enmity, distrust and isolation. The NIH Director works in Building 1 and oversees 27 other Institutes that research various diseases—the one most people have heard of is the National Cancer Institute. But to most of these institute directors, Building1 is a dark hole they both fear and despise. If you’re a running a research lab in Wisconsin this probably doesn’t matter to you; if you’re bed ridden with an undiagnosed, complex neurological disease—a life put on hold—why would you care?

But at every level today NIH’s management is distanced further away from its overall mission to advance science that improves health.

NIH scientists are quite busy with their research and don’t always read news about NIH scandals. I don’t, because I don’t really have time, nor do I care. But turmoil from the recent election has caused me to read about the retirement of Dr. Lawrence Tabak, who served as Principal Deputy Director, the number two position at NIH. I have worked with and observed Dr. Tabak’s ascent to this commanding position at NIH, from which he weaponized systems and processes to harm those who disagreed with his views or decisions.

Yet, I saw none of this in a news account by the New York Times and much of the reporting seemed to describe a different person than the Larry Tabak that I know. According to this New York Times reporter, Tabak’s retirement was “surprising” as he was “long considered a steadying force” and “someone who could work across party lines.”

Tabak’s retirement was not “surprising.” After Trump won office, Tabak told senior NIH officials several times in private meetings that he might be forced to retire or step down. And he was only a “steadying force” if he liked you personally and you didn’t dare to question his decisions or those made by his favored staff.

I find it odd that the New York Times would report that Tabak was “someone who could work across party lines.” Like almost every NIH leader, Tabak is a committed Democrat who can work with Republicans if he holds his nose, but he despised President Trump. Several have heard Tabak say several times that he couldn't stand to be in the same room as Trump.

Science Magazine quoted former NIH employee Carrie Wolinetz complimenting Dr. Tabak, saying, “There is probably no single person who is as universally highly respected at NIH as Larry Tabak.” On the contrary, he is likely the most feared and disliked individual at the NIH and his departure brings relief to many.

Science Magazine must have been hunting only for compliments, because they also ran a comment posted on Bluesky by Jeremy Berg, former director of NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences. Berg very accurately describes that it was Tabak’s unfortunate job to deal with all the NIH’s messy and intractable problems. “Larry has shoveled so much $hit over the years that he would have been well qualified to work behind the elephants in an old circus,” Berg said.

But Tabak flung that $hit on many of those around him, often injuring us with the same shovel he threw around to make himself look good to his superiors and university leaders. As for the STAT news headline that Tabak’s retirement “adds to sense of deep uncertainty,” I would say it brings a sense of optimism about the agency’s future.

I can only guess that NIH leadership and the press office are feeding these stories to reporters, because they do not comport with the experiences of many others including myself. My point is that outsiders are given a warped view of the problems inside the agency, and are not equipped to understand that change is needed.

Tabak’ retirement put him in the news, a position he shied away from for many years. He virtually ran the NIH because Francis Collins, who was director for over a decade, allowed him full rein. Widely regarded as an expert chess player, Tabak ran the place behind the scenes like a mafia Don, rewarding his friends and bullying others who hurt his ego.

When the Senate confirmed Monica Bertagnolli as the new NIH Director in 2023, I wondered if her leadership might fix many of the agency’s problems, but this was not the case. Dr. Bergnatoli lost 36 votes in her confirmation to mostly Republican senators from rural states, and she was hell bent on keeping that job.

She began to court the Senators she lost, and started building a research portfolio focused on a more politically neutral definition for diversity. Instead of using race or color as a means of establishing diversity, she launched new initiatives that called for diversity based on access to rural health care.

But this work meant she did not have the time to focus on running NIH, and because Tabak knew how to get things done, he became her valuable second hand and continued holding on to power. Collins was very crafty in managing NIH politics and let Tabak do his dirty work, as long as he behaved in public, as self-effacing and humble. But Bertagnolli was just clueless, and Tabak surrounded her with people based on loyalty to him, not her mission for public research.

The word diversity is a big buzzword inside the NIH but I don't really think they care about hiring minorities and women as much as following guidelines, rules and regulations that tout diversity. Minority women and men across the campus are just not promoted. Yes, there have been initiatives, and diversity emails to read, and classes to take, but NIH has long been a male dominated environment.

It’s a Woke culture that isn’t really woke.

There have been attempts to change this with more female leaders in the last 10 years. But NIH is not a merit-based system. It’s a cabal where people appoint their loyalists and contrive to manipulate our public agency to their personal advantage. Not enough women are at the top with clout to give handouts, so it’s a slow, slow transformation.

The NIH is now in the press almost every day for alleged “funding cuts for research” but that’s not really true. The NIH has cut costs that universities can charge for administrative fees, but they have not cut the grant money provided directly to scientists. I can’t explain why this is being twisted in the news, but I’m sure that people in the director’s office are doing this to harm the credibility of the incoming NIH Director.

These are the games that NIH leadership play all the time. They use the media to manipulate coverage and maintain control, often to cover up things they fail to deliver to the public.

Some of this misinformation you are reading about NIH funding cuts is likely also coming from universities who have grown used to fat checks from the NIH, but nobody is really taking money away from them. It’s about being fair with taxpayer money.

Everyone thinks that the most prestigious scientists on planet Earth work at universities like Harvard and Oxford, but within the scientific world many are in awe of the researchers at the NIH. Over 170 NIH scientists or those whose research is supported by NIH have won Nobel Prizes. NIH has its own intramural science program designed to perform cutting edge studies, some of which is almost impossible to do in a university setting. For example, if a child or an adult has a very rare condition that no one can diagnose, NIH can actually do genetic analyses and work backwards to identify the cause of the disease and then design therapies to help these patients.

But over the last decade or so, NIH’s intramural program has ballooned into an unmanageable enterprise, with over 1,2000 principal investigators. And while brilliant work is being done, there’s also complacency, stagnation, and entitlement. Because they are at NIH, federal researchers get a lot of guaranteed money that scientists at universities have to bust for. And there’s not much accountability.

NIH labs and research programs get reviewed by scientists at prestigious research universities to ensure they publish excellent studies. But these university scientists are, at the same time, beholden to the NIH for grants to fund their own studies. This conflict of interest ensures that the reviews are biased to favor NIH labs, because no professor wants to anger the agency that funds his own grants.

For this reason, numerous NIH scientists go unchecked and continue running their research programs for too many years.

Tony Fauci is the most notable example of someone rising through the ranks to become an institute director who was feared for decades because he held the purse strings to billions of dollars in grants as head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Anyone inside the NIH who questioned Tony got shafted and targeted by the leadership in the NIH Director’s office.

Throughout the pandemic, America was consumed by debate over whether the pandemic started from a lab accident, and most scientists seem to believe it didn’t. But in his final week, President Biden handed Tony Fauci a preemptive pardon, and the pardon stretched all the way back to 2014. That was the first year Fauci began funding EcoHealth Alliance, which subcontracted with a lab in Wuhan, China for gain-of-function virus research. A few days after President Trump was sworn in, the CIA released a Biden administration assessment that found the coronavirus is "more likely" to have leaked from a Chinese lab than to have come from animals.

When Congress investigated Fauci’s management of the grant to EcoHealth Alliance they found a lack of transparency and a blatant cover-up. These congressional hearings are available online, as are the Committee reports and the NIH documents and emails Congress released. Yet Tabak nor anyone inside the Director’s office ever discussed these matters with the broader NIH community, nor did they inform NIH scientists of what Congress uncovered.

Nobody within NIH leadership was held responsible for what happened with EcoHealth Alliance, nor have they been held liable for other scandals. Congress found that NIH hid their handling of sexual harassment complaints, forcing a Committee to send them legal subpoeanas. NIH also denied performing gain-of-function studies on monkeypox virus, until Congress caught them doing so. Pile on top of this, an NIH Alzheimer’s researcher was caught in fraud, and there has been a complete lack of accountability for an NIH-funded scientist who failed to release a study on puberty blockers, because the results did not align with orthodoxy that puberty blockers benefit transgender children.

In each of these disgraceful incidents, the NIH old guard circled the wagons instead of protecting science, because they are corrupted with power. The proof is in their behavior, and every time Congress confronted them, there was always this stonewalling and masking of accountability

Coverup has been the hallmark of people in the director’s office for over a decade.

Most staff, including myself, are puzzled by the sudden change of attitude towards NIH, both by Congress and the public. How did an institution that was held in such high regard and that was blessed with bipartisan support for so long sink to this level of distrust and suspicion?

If you go to the press, to complain about the NIH you are done for. Remaining anonymous while speaking up for change is now the best option for anyone at NIH wishing for a complete leadership overhaul to bring about a brighter future.