By the time their spending accounts were reactivated on Thursday, some scientists at the National Institutes of Health said they were running on fumes.
They had spent weeks scrambling to keep their labs running amid spending freezes, firing rampages and the chaos and confusion brought on by both. They were reusing latex gloves in an effort to conserve supplies. They were borrowing, donating and sharing a long roster of crucial but dwindling reagents with one another, in email threads that had morphed into virtual bazaars. In interviews, several of them said they would have to close up shop in as little as two or three weeks if something didn’t change drastically, and soon.
The unfreezing of agency credit cards (what scientists there call purchasing cards or p-cards) is a welcome but insufficient reprieve from this spiral. It will restore at least some hope to a work force disillusioned by major changes under the Trump administration, but it will improve things materially only at the margins: For one thing, several other financial restrictions remain in place (and many of the people with the clearance needed to use the reinstated cards have been fired).
For another, much more chaos is still in the offing. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency has ordered the N.I.H. to cut 35 percent of its $16.7 billion contract spending budget. If “contract spending” sounds like a code for bureaucratic waste, it is not. Scientists, research assistants and animal technicians are often funded through contracts. So are the clinical trial coordinators who process samples and monitor patient safety, the skilled machinists who maintain microscopes and mass spectrometers and M.R.I.s and the office managers who serve as the institutes’ de facto nerve centers.
“They don’t just order supplies and book travel,” one scientist, who was granted anonymity to discuss sensitive matters at the agency, told me. “They filter every request through a web of restrictions and regulations meant to keep N.I.H. compliant with federal laws. If we lose our office managers, everything falls apart.”
As if none of that were bad enough, people in the agency said the N.I.H. is also set to lose a majority of staff members who work on contracts on June 2, when the 60-day notice period (legally required for firings related to force reduction) concludes; the scientists I spoke with said all of those working for the scientific institutes had been fired.