Earlier this year, Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, discovered that Donald Trump’s appointees were repeatedly questioning the role of vaccines in protecting health. When she raised concerns, Marrazzo was demoted.
That, however, was not the end of the dispute. The infectious diseases specialist filed a whistleblower complaint, and as The New York Times reported in a new piece, that appears to have led to her ouster. From the article:
Three weeks after a leading scientist at the National Institutes of Health filed a whistle-blower complaint against the Trump administration, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy fired her, according to her lawyer and a copy of the termination letter. … Dr. Marrazzo said in her complaint last month that the N.I.H. had placed her on administrative leave after she objected to Trump administration actions that she said had endangered research subjects, defied court orders and undermined vaccine research.
In theory, Marrazzo might have been able to turn to the federal agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers, but Donald Trump fired its director and gutted the office.
Making matters worse is the familiarity of the circumstances. Indeed, it was earlier this week when two government civil rights lawyers who spoke out about the Trump administration’s efforts to limit enforcement of the Fair Housing Act were removed from their posts and escorted out of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
About a month earlier, Charles Borges, the Social Security Administration’s former chief data officer, filed a remarkable whistleblower complaint that led to his “involuntary resignation.” In theory, there’s nothing especially partisan or ideological about whistleblowers. Sometimes those who work in federal agencies will see some kind of wrongdoing — corruption, mismanagement, inefficiencies, fraud and misuse of resources, etc. — and it’s in everyone’s interest to have a system in which such witnesses are able to come forward, confident in the knowledge that they’ll be heard and respected without being punished. In practice, that system appears to be unraveling with unnerving speed, sending a signal to federal officials: Those who speak up should expect to be punished.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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