The National Institutes of Health awarded a consulting firm a $7 million contract earlier this month to retain “subject matter experts” who would help the NIH conform to President Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s vision of a new American public health system.
The contract was awarded to Credence Management Solutions without competition through an already-existing General Services Administration contract. It comes as Trump and Kennedy radically reshape the Department of Health and Human Services and how it uses contracts, with orders to slash current spending levels by 35%.
Credence is a Virginia-based government contractor that has worked extensively with the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Defense, but rarely with HHS and never before with the NIH. It’s unclear exactly which NIH initiatives Credence’s subject matter experts will support. But the contract’s language suggests a key role in furthering the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda.
The contract documents describe its purpose as deploying scientific, operations and business personnel to “optimize scientific and organizational operations and priorities” to comply with Trump’s February executive order that directed the NIH to “prioritize gold-standard research on the root causes of why Americans are getting sick.” It names a variety of health concerns, including cancer, asthma, autoimmune diseases, autism spectrum disorders and diabetes that it says pose a “dire threat to the American people and our way of life.”
The contract-justification document also states that Credence has a “unique set of qualifications that will aid NIH in accomplishing the executive order.” It lists some of Credence’s capabilities as health IT, digital health, artificial intelligence and cloud engineering.
“Credence offers comprehensive data management solutions for large health and biomedical datasets,” the document states. “Credence has established cloud repositories for storing and analyzing multimodal data, as well as tools to harmonize and integrate disparate data types.”
Credence did not respond to a request for comment.
These capabilities could prove useful for some of the administration’s health goals. Kennedy and the NIH’s director, Jay Bhattacharya, recently put forward a plan to use federal health data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to allow the NIH to build a “real-world data platform” that would allow the agency to determine the causes of autism and other “chronic diseases.”
The NIH and HHS did not respond to requests for comment.
The contract document says that Credence can use artificial intelligence, machine learning and other computational tools to “analyze and extract salient information from health data and related sources with a successful track record delivering health analytics solutions for disease surveillance.”
The new contract comes as HHS undergoes a comprehensive restructuring, directed by Kennedy with the assistance of DOGE, that aims to reduce the number of agency employees by 20,000 and consolidate the department’s 28 divisions to 15. While a judge last week ordered the administration to temporarily pause its mass layoffs and program cuts, and some HHS layoffs have reportedly been reversed, many congressionally mandated public health programs have been halted by the cuts.
DOGE also specifically ordered HHS to cut 35% of its contract spending. An HHS spokesperson told NOTUS at the time that the 35% reduction was a “strategic initiative across all divisions of HHS, with the goal of cutting unnecessary spending, saving taxpayer dollars, and streamlining operations.”
The NIH in particular has long relied on contract employees; they make up nearly half of the agency’s workforce and include many of the scientists and research technicians that conduct health research. The NIH has allowed some contractors’ work orders to expire without renewal, effectively firing them.
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.