Fired research scientist calls the DOGE efforts indiscriminate and alarming.
Gretchen Cochran
Original Air Date: Feb. 19, 2025
Host: We tend to think of the new federal Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, taking its bulldozer to offices and jobs in Washington. Actually, that blade is scraping across the country, including Florida and the Suncoast. Gretchen Cochran talked with a couple of local people whose jobs have been axed.
Due to technical problems, we had to replace her voice—apologies.
Gretchen Cochran: DOGE is flexing its muscle, issuing orders that are often followed by orders undoing the previous ones. Confusion abounds. Still, these orders result in actual shuttered offices, locked computers, and job losses.
For Eric Henry, it’s the “return to office” mandate that is causing grief. The Sarasota resident is a PhD research scientist with the National Institute of Health, also known as NIH. He’s worked in his same home office for 45 years, entirely remotely. While he knows people already fired or fearful of it, his own concern is different. He, like all remote workers, has been ordered to return to NIH’s Bethesda, Maryland office in a month. Henry cannot do that due to a family situation requiring his staying here.
The attempted firings are devastating to the people and to their organizations. So far, 1,000 people (or 10% of NIH employees) have accepted retirement, he was told in an email Sunday.
While his personal concern is for his long-term research, it is what could be happening to NIH that particularly causes him grief.
Thousands of highly qualified people will be looking for jobs. Unemployment will go up, Henry believes. This will not only affect the economy but it will drain the life blood of the institution, the young scientists around whom the entire system revolves. Eric Henry:
Eric Henry: We did get an email notice today that there are a huge number of people at my institute and at the NIH in general who have already been handed these notices. The unfortunate thing is, they tend to be the probationary employees, the ones who are there in the first few years of their career. For some reason, the move has been to cut the program off at its knees by removing these probationary employees who are very much the future of the institution.
A logo used for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
GC: Henry said DOGE is encouraging people to snitch, firing some with the pretext of performance issues. It is insane, absurd, inexcusable, he said.
One Bradenton resident working for a different federal department was fearful of speaking on the record. She did tell WSLR that the policy now is that after the hiring freeze, and before any one new person is hired, they must be approved by DOGE, and three people must be fired. In her particular office, DOGE employees came in and changed the computer codes so that employees cannot get into them.
As an aside, you can follow this changing terrain at whitehouse.gov. When you open the website, “Implementing the President’s Department of Government Efficiency Workforce Optimization Initiative” immediately pops up.
“The time has come. Together we can cure sickle cell disease.”
But back to Eric Henry and the NIH. His most recent work for the agency has centered on finding an inexpensive drug to treat sickle cell anemia, a disabling disease that strikes primarily African Americans.
Besides the return-to-office mandate and the laying off of good employees, Henry said the administration is also cutting support funds for research grants. Florida’s research universities like Florida State University and the University of Florida will be impacted.
EH: The NIH administers billions of dollars’ worth of grants to outside researchers at universities and other institutions across the country. What they have done now is they have mandated that overhead costs—these are the costs provided to these grantees to pay their hosting institutions for things like air conditioning, heating, and all the infrastructure things that research requires—they are trying to trim that down to 15 percent, which is an unrealistically low number. That’s going to have an effect in institutions in every state of the union.
It’s another front on which the attacks on the validity and the viability of our research efforts in this country are taking place. I realize this is supposed to be in pursuit of broad based cost cuts, but the indiscriminate nature of it is the alarming thing.
Host: This report was produced by Gretchen Cochran for WSLR News.
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