Workers at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, were welcomed Monday morning by several dozen people holding signs and handing out snacks in what organizers called a “back-to-office support rally.”
It comes amid fallout from the Trump administration’s drastic cuts in research funding.
“We’re out here today at NIH, showing our love and support for NIH employees,” said Rob Wald, rally organizer with the Third Act advocacy group, made up of people over the age of 60.
Many employees are returning to work across NIH’s campuses, after President Donald Trump’s executive order that they return to in-person work, five days a week.
Asked why she was thanking employees and offering doughnut holes to those walking past the Gateway Center entrance, one rally member said, “Because they do important work with lifesaving research, and it affects all of us.”
Wald said he spoke with a woman who was undergoing a clinical trial at NIH.
“She told me her life is at stake, because the clinical trial is threatened,” Wald said. “That will really affect every family, every person in the country, if we don’t keep our medical research going strong. The U.S. has been a leader in medical research, and we’re in danger of just throwing that all away.”
Holding a sign that reads “Gutting research makes us sick,” one rally member said he was participating because, “They’re heroes, they work here at NIH, they do research, they save lives, they help people with rare diseases — they should be treated with respect.”
According to the journal Nature, NIH is the world’s biggest funder of biomedical research and widely considered the gold standard for a research-funding agency.
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