Former National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Francis Collins said Wednesday a “great cloud looms” over the Bethesda-based agency and warned that cuts to federal funding and staff will prevent physicians from keeping Americans healthy.
“That kind of [cutting] effort can’t happen without serious and severe consequences to everything we’re trying to do for cancer, for heart disease, for diabetes, for rare diseases, for common diseases, for infectious diseases, all of those,” Collins said during Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich’s media briefing Wednesday. Collins was invited by Elrich to address local members of the press on the virtual meeting.
Collins, 74, abruptly retired March 1 from NIH, where he had been conducting genetics research since stepping down as director in 2021. His retirement comes as the agency grapples with massive funding and personnel cuts, including more than 1,200 NIH employees in recent weeks by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as part of President Donald Trump’s promise to reduce the country’s federal workforce. Collins did not give a reason for his departure from the agency, the Associated Press reported.
Collins first came to NIH in 1993 to lead the Human Genome Project and later was promoted to become NIH’s director, a role he served in under presidents Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
According to CNN, more than 103,000 federal workers across the country have been laid off since Trump’s Jan. 20 inauguration.
More than 70,000 federal workers live in the county and the Trump administration’s layoffs and firings have already impacted more than 1,000 residents, according to county officials. That number does not include federal workers who reside in neighboring jurisdictions and work at agencies based in the county, such as NIH, the Food and Drug Administration in White Oak or the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Silver Spring.
“This [administration] has involved quite a number of really quite dramatic actions that are degrading the ability of NIH to perform the mission that I think the taxpayers expect us to do, in terms of making discoveries about how life works and how disease happens and what to do about it,” Collins said. “We’ve been incredibly successful at that over these many decades — deaths from heart disease and deaths from cancer are dropping significantly. Sickle cell disease is being cured.”
Collins said he is concerned the NIH layoffs will encourage young, highly educated scientists to move to countries that are prioritizing health science research.
“All of those folks are really deeply alarmed about whether that career path is there for them, ” Collins said. “We were always the place where everybody wanted to come to pursue their scientific dreams. Now the idea that that might flip around the other way is almost inconceivable.”
Collins said he hopes that Jay Bhattacharya, the new NIH director confirmed Tuesday by Congress, will “avoid the extreme degree of damage that may be underway.”
When asked by Bethesda Today if the private sector will have to step up in the absence of government support for health science research, Collins said he wishes the private sector would “make some more noise right now about this, because their future is at risk in a big way.
“The success of American biomedical research has been an ecosystem that involves the public sector and the private sector in a way that has been remarkably successful,” Collins said. “The reason that you have drugs now on the shelves that are saving lives and reducing suffering is because that ecosystem works. … You might not notice it for the few months, but 10 years from now, if NIH has lost its bearings and lost its momentum, there’ll be serious consequences for the entire system.”
