The acting director of the National Institutes of Health directed agency employees to comply with the Office of Personnel Management’s request for weekly reports of what they accomplished in the previous week.
Acting NIH Director Matthew Memoli said in an email reviewed by NOTUS that “the expectation is that HHS employees complete the same task and respond to the email every Monday.”
Going forward, HHS will send a reminder email weekly, Memoli wrote. Contractors are exempt from the requirement.
Memoli’s email was in response to two emails sent from HHS to all department employees early Monday morning and reviewed by NOTUS, directing them to respond to the OPM email, but to do so “in a manner that protects sensitive data,” like specific grants, contracts, drugs or devices.
The email noted that NIH staff should be “mindful to heed the specific instructions, especially around sensitive information.”
The new guidance is a reversal of what HHS told its employees after OPM’s first email last week, when the agency said employees didn’t have to respond, but if they did, to assume “malign foreign actors” might read their responses and to leave out any sensitive information. While the first HHS email about the OPM guidance on Monday reiterated the foreign actors warning, a second, similar email from the department did not.
Other agencies — including the State Department and the FBI — had also told employees last week to not respond. Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency has been given a mandate from Trump to root out any perceived waste in the federal government, said that employees who didn’t respond would be fired.
This newest iteration of the “five bullet points” email was meant to be sent out by individual agencies rather than from OPM directly, the Associated Press reported. But it came from the same OPM email address as the first bullet points email.
DOGE employees have reportedly been granted access to the NIH’s finance system. Nearly 1,200 probationary employees at the NIH were laid off in February as part of government-wide cuts to the federal workforce. Several long-standing employees of the NIH have also left the agency in recent days, including former director Francis Collins, principal deputy director Lawrence Tabak and deputy director of extramural research Michael Lauer.
Memoli was formerly director of the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases Clinical Studies Unit in the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He gained prominence during the COVID-19 pandemic for arguing against vaccine mandates. Trump’s nominee for director of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, is expected to appear before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions this Wednesday.
Memoli’s email concluded with a thank-you to NIH staff “for all of your hard work as we continue to adapt to the Administration’s directives.”
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Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.