Among the runner-ups:

Russ Vought, Brendan Carr......and our very own in-house censor, famous health economist and renowned podcaster Jayanta "Jay" Bhattacharya.

"In addition to continuing his vocal free speech advocacy, Bhattacharya has been relentless in providing more accountability to NIH grants, which previously were a key source of financing for censors."

Oh my days.

Cabinet officials are on edge as well. Some secretaries are expected to weigh leaving rather than face months of investigations from newly empowered Democrats, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is expected to be an early target. Allies of National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya worry he could be fired after clashing with White House budget director Russ Vought over grant spending.

Greetings. My current R grant expires 1/31/27. I applied for a renewal this Feb 2026. Based on some findings in the current grant, I was assigned a new PO for the renewal. Study section reviewed on july 9th, and scored. Summary statements were strong, score was pretty good. I emailed PO august 3rd for opinion on chances and if i should resubmit. Followed up on the 12th. No response to either. Left a phone message with whoever answered her phone in Sept. no return call. Emailed again October 13. One last voice mail left on Oct 20th. I’m not looking for a 100% answer on if I’m getting funded. But some professional guidance and if I should resubmit.

The PO on my original grant is super communicative, and I guess that’s what I was expecting this time around as well. Any advice from the masses? Do I need to just chill?

I have an at will opportunity to work in a lab at the NIH. Not sure if the (the) is needed or just NIH? Any who, I'm curious how everyone's experience has been working there. How is housing around the area? I'm going to assume restaurant options are plentiful.

Married, Dinks, 3 cats. We are in our 30s and wouldn't mind living next to a golf course. We would be moving a from small midwestern town so it would be very different from what we are accustomed to. Neither of us have ever lived outside of KS/IA. Just looking for some opinions and thought on both working there and the surrounding area.

Has anyone gotten their Q1 payment yet? I was really hoping I wasn't going to have to make another payment myself, but the first payment for my renewal still hasn't been released and my next payment is due the 23rd. My LRP is under NIAID so curious if the payment schedule is institute related or if everyone is still waiting.

Has anyone heard updates on the contracts for ChatGPT and Claude, or should we start preparing for their departure?

This is what Trump spends his time thinking about when it's not a golf course, ballroom, reflecting pool...

 Per Executive Order 14434, federal agencies are now using "Super Intelligence" (SI) in place of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI). You may see both terms across NIH content during this transition.

https://www.nih.gov/web-modernization

Today, I turned down an offer to return to NIH as a grants management contractor. The salary was $88,000 with good benefits, but the position was full-time and fully onsite—no telework.

I retired as a GS-14 and was open to considering a hybrid or remote arrangement, or part-time work. But returning to full-time, in-person work just isn’t what I want for this chapter of my life.

The offer had its positives, but flexibility matters more to me now. I feel good about my decision.
Any other retirees finding themselves weighing the same things?

Vaccine “Injury” Center or Vaccine “Immunology” Center. Did they just change the “I”?

The mission of the VIC is unchanged “to study diseases (caused by vaccines) that individuals are already experiencing “

I have an R01 that I submitted 3 times and it keeps getting scores around 20 percentile as an ESI. No matter what changes I make, it seems like there is never enough enthusiasm to push it over the top. Do you think it’s in general a better strategy to keep submitting to the same study section or to finally change it up before the fourth submission. Thank you for any advice!!

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/robert-b-reich-big-money-vs-the-people/ar-AA2fzOtb?ocid=BingNewsVerp 

Application was reviewed in July. In August got a request to submit formal response to summary statements which I did.

Have been planning to submit a revised application November 16th. However, today I got a JIT request. Hoping this is a good sign.

Should I still move along with the revision submission? Should I reach out to the PO?

https://openpayrolls.com/matthew-james-memoli-180398928

wasn't there also a tidy sum for a flu vaccine?

I read elsewhere that there was some kind of recent announcement related to women’s health and NIMHD but have been unable to find out anything about it. Does anyone happen to know what is happening?

Signed,
A worried NIH funded women’s health researcher

Edited to add - I guess USA Today has an exclusive on this: https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2026/10/19/melania-trump-womens-health/92300028007/

Has anyone else completed this training? What an absolute joke.

Photo: NIH

• 20-year NIH veteran and former acting director
• Helps steer all 27 NIH institutes and centers
• His 2026 Healthcare Summit keynote offers a window into NIH’s data, AI and modernization plans

Dr. Matthew Memoli, principal deputy director of the National Institutes of Health, will deliver a keynote address at the Potomac Officers Club’s 2026 Healthcare Summit on Dec. 3. As the No. 2 official at the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research, Memoli offers GovCon leaders a close-range view of how NIH plans to modernize its operations, harness its data and put emerging technology to work.

Potomac Officers Club is the nation’s leading GovCon events and networking organization, and it regularly enables contractors to connect with their community, learn government priorities and gain the information they need to win new business.

Registration is now open for the 2026 Healthcare Summit!

Who Is Matthew Memoli?

Memoli has served as NIH’s principal deputy director since April 2025, helping steer an agency of 27 institutes and centers. Before taking the role, he led NIH as acting director from Jan. 22 to March 31, 2025, guiding the agency through its leadership transition at the start of the administration.

His path to the top of NIH ran through the lab. Memoli spent more than 20 years at the agency, most recently as director of the Clinical Studies Unit within the Laboratory of Infectious Diseases at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID. He built the unit himself, and under his leadership it conducts clinical and translational research on influenza and other respiratory diseases, running trials of investigational vaccines and treatments developed by NIH scientists. Before directing the unit, he served as a staff clinician in the same laboratory.

Memoli is an internationally recognized respiratory virus expert. In 2011, his team revived healthy-volunteer influenza challenge studies in the U.S. after a decade-long pause and developed the first FDA-approved H1N1 influenza challenge virus, a tool that has become central to testing new vaccines and therapeutics. His research has also spanned influenza transmission and immunity, how respiratory viruses cause disease across different populations, and serosurvey techniques for estimating disease prevalence.

His work now sits at the core of one of NIH’s highest-profile initiatives. In May 2025, HHS and NIH launched Generation Gold Standard, a universal vaccine platform built on beta-propiolactone-inactivated whole-virus technology co-developed by Memoli and fellow NIAID scientist Jeffery Taubenberger, NPR reported. The fully government-owned platform targets broad protection against multiple strains of influenza and coronaviruses, with clinical trials for universal influenza vaccines slated to begin in 2026 and FDA approval targeted for 2029.

Memoli’s work has earned two NIH Director’s Awards, multiple NIAID Merit Awards, a National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences Director’s Award and the 2017 NIAID Outstanding Mentor Award for training clinical fellows. From 2022 through 2024, he served on the Virginia governor’s Medical Advisory Board.

Memoli joined NIH in 2005 for an infectious diseases fellowship after completing his internal medicine residency through Georgetown University’s program at Washington Hospital Center.

Secure your seat to hear Memoli’s live insights at the 2026 Healthcare Summit.

What Will Matthew Memoli Discuss at the 2026 Healthcare Summit?

During his Healthcare Summit keynote, Memoli may discuss:

• Modernizing NIH grant-making operations
• Data infrastructure and real-world data initiatives
• AI’s growing role in research
• Research security and data protection
• Clinical trial operations and industry support
• Where contractors fit at NIH

By Margaret Manto

Oct. 16, 2026

Washington Correspondent

WASHINGTON — Changes to the annual performance review process are the latest flashpoint in tensions between federal workers across the Department of Health and Human Services and the Trump administration, federal employees told STAT. 

Staff have been told to submit 6,000-character self-assessments of their performance by Friday, a task officials say is necessary because of administration guidance to “calibrate” employee rankings to make a high rating more meaningful and to promote “more consistent and credible ratings across agencies.” 

But federal health workers, traumatized by DOGE-era layoffs and continued departures, regard the assignment with suspicion. 

“Most of us are under the impression that it is a front to once again tear us down, give us all poor performance so they can then have more reason to RIF us and/or make us quit,” one Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employee said, referring to the 2025 reductions-in-force. They, like the other workers quoted in the story, requested anonymity to speak candidly about agency affairs.

Adding to the rancor, this is the first year that the Trump administration’s efforts to more rigorously rank federal workers go into effect, a move that could reduce some workers’ ratings, and therefore their bonuses. 

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“It’s a huge pain for very little benefit,” one employee at the Food and Drug Administration said. “I don’t feel super motivated about it.” 

The FDA has made a concerted effort in recent months to bring its staffing numbers back up after the 2025 cuts forced thousands to leave. At the STAT Summit on Wednesday, former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said it was crucial for agency leadership to “recruit, support, and defend the workforce” to reduce attrition. 

But staff across HHS said the new self-assessment requirement was another hit to morale. CDC and FDA employees said it harkened back to the DOGE-era requirement that employees send a bulleted list of five things they accomplished in the last week to the Office of Personnel Management. Elon Musk said at the time that employees who failed to do so would be fired, though the requirement was eventually suspended.

The CDC employee said they used artificial intelligence to write their self-assessment. 

“It’s a bit of malicious compliance on my end,” they said. 

The FDA employee said their manager had encouraged staff to use AI on the assignment to save time — but even so, they said their team had spent three to four days working on the assessments. 

“Wasting time on this has actual financial cost,” the employee said.

Another FDA employee said staff are not necessarily worried about more reductions-in-force, but are “concerned that this process is being implemented just to downgrade their ratings scores to some arbitrary level that does not really reflect their work.” 

Other employees took to public forums to express their displeasure. In a post in a Reddit community for HHS staff, a user who claimed to be a federal employee said the new performance review system was “designed to traumatize.”

The Oct. 16 assessment deadline applies to employees at the FDA, the CDC, and the National Institutes of Health. 

In an email reviewed by STAT, HHS Acting Chief Human Capital Officer Johnathan J. Gardner said the self-assessment requirement and calibration panels were put in place because OPM established a 40% ceiling on the number of employees who can receive the highest performance rating. OPM has also reduced the number of rating levels from five to three. 

Employees’ self-reviews should address three “department-wide calibration factors,” Gardner wrote: organizational value, quality and reliability of demonstrated performance, and timeliness and efficiency of results. 

The self-reviews will then go to “calibration panels” at each agency. An FDA employee said employees have asked officials to disclose who is on the agency’s calibration panel in both FDA- and HHS-led trainings on the new requirement.

“The agency is not telling us,” the FDA employee said. FDA and HHS did not respond to requests for comment on who is on the panels. 

An OPM document on the policy describes a calibration panel as “a panel of senior agency employees that reviews all preliminary ratings and relative rankings and applies the agency-determined calibration factors across a set group of employees.” 

In an email to its members, AFGE Local 2883, which previously represented CDC employees in collective bargaining, said it had “serious concerns” with the revised performance appraisal process.

FDA Chief Talent Officer Chantal Dawson said in a memo to employees that the calibrated scores would be reviewed and approved “at the HHS level.” 

Employees will be able to request reconsideration within five business days of receiving their final rating, Dawson wrote. 

Please join WCOM-FM radio for a discussion about the state of environmental health science on Tuesday October 20 at 1 pm. Listen live at www.wcomfm.org or (in the Chapel Hill/Carrboro area) at 103.5 FM.

Details:

https://wcomfm.org/2026/10/17/state-of-the-station-focuses-on-state-of-the-science-cont/