National Institutes of Health lays off hundreds more staff, including at cancer research institute

The National Institutes of Health has laid off hundreds more staff, multiple current and laid-off employees of the health agency told CBS News, including at its cancer research institute.

Around 200 employees began receiving layoff notices Friday evening, said three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The move surprised NIH officials, since the department previously claimed no further cuts were planned at the agency. 

“We thought the worst was behind us, and we were transitioning into this new phase, and the rug was just pulled out from underneath us,” one laid-off employee said.

A spokesperson for the NIH did not comment on why NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya sought the additional layoffs, referring a request for comment to the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH. HHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Among the cuts were around 50 employees at the NIH’s National Cancer Institute, or NCI. They had worked in the institute’s Office of Communications and Public Liaison overseeing programs like the Cancer Information Service, which provides answers to doctors and patients about cancer, and updates to databases summarizing cancer information for healthcare providers. 

The layoff notices came a day after staff in that NCI communications office had met with top-ranking NIH leaders, to discuss drawing up plans to consolidate their staff into a new centralized communications arm across the agency. 

While several communications offices at the NIH’s institutes had been gutted during an initial round of layoffs on April 1, NCI’s team was spared. Only a handful of NCI staff had been laid off last month, two people said, including in the institute’s human resources teams.

“Leadership was in the process of transferring some process and some of our media relations people over to NIH, because they were still getting press inquiries, but they couldn’t handle the volume of inquiries that were coming through,” the laid-off employee said.

Two people said they had been told that the second round of cuts was done as part of an effort to compensate for other scientists needing to be reinstated at Bhattacharya’s agency, in order to comply with layoff targets.