In this episode of In the Headlines, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor of the The Cancer Letter, and Claire Marie Porter, reporter, discuss Claire’s interview with an NCI employee who was fired just days after returning from parental leave.
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The story provides a personal perspective from one HHS employee who was fired as part of Department of Government Efficiency’s mass termination of probationary employees.
To protect the employee’s identity, The Cancer Letter uses gender-neutral pronouns, the pseudonym “Taylor,” and distorted audio recordings. The choice was necessary to protect Taylor’s identity, but ultimately became representative of the fact that this is happening to so many people.
“[Taylor was] hoping to go on the record initially and then decided not to, but we kind of realized that making Taylor anonymous worked really well, because their story is kind of exemplary of so many other stories,” Claire said. “They’re not the only one with just weeks or months left in their probationary period. So, it kind of ended up working out that they spoke for a lot of people.”
Taylor was weeks away from the end of their probationary period, which would have ensured job security.
Taylor is working with a legal team to try to get their job back. But even if they are successful, the damage done to the HHS work environment by DOGE and the Trump Administration will remain.
“Federal employees already go through this rigorous process to become government employees. So, just this increased oversight is just a bit humiliating,” Claire said. “Also just the fact that there’s this new kind of tenor of distrust and mistrust of federal employees. Taylor did say that it just won’t be the same. And that’s disappointing.”
Read more: Fired NCI employee says Trump’s purge was baseless yet punitive—“I feel like I’ve been erased.”
Other stories mentioned in this podcast include:
- Pushing for tax cuts, Trump threatens the federal workforce, Medicaid, and cancer research
- Guest editorial by W. Kimryn Rathmell: Telling our stories: Bidirectional benefits of sharing our history
- Shearwood McClelland III: “When you stand for something, you’re always going to be attacked.”
- Guest editorial by Harpreet Singh: Biomarker-driven innovation: What the FDA’s evolving strategy means for oncology
- In an oral history now taken down by FDA, Peter Greenwald discusses controversy over health claims on Kellogg’s All-Bran
This episode was transcribed using AI transcription services. It has been reviewed by our editorial staff, but the transcript may be imperfect.
The following is a transcript of this week’s In the Headlines, a weekly series on The Cancer Letter podcast:
Jacquelyn Cobb (00:01): This week on The Cancer Letter podcast…
Taylor (00:04): There is constant tension and worry about who’s next? Who’s coming? Who will be in the next reduction in force? Should we be looking for other positions? That’s sad, because these individuals have dedicated their whole careers to this.
I truly thought this would be my whole career. I thought I would start as a junior scientist, an investigator in government science, and be one of those people in my late sixties or seventies saying,
‘I’ve helped trainees, I’ve helped patients, I’ve helped steer research agendas, I’ve created ultimate outcomes,’ and looked back on a career and said, ‘yes, this was the most satisfying job I could have ever had.’
And I don’t know if I’ll get that back. And certainly right now—I’m not allowed to live out that kind of fantasy.
You know, think about it. The individuals that are being let go, these are people that have dedicated their lives to training and service. And we have loads of student loans from a lot of education, and it’s like, “Now what do we do?”
Paul Goldberg (01:26): You’re listening to The Cancer Letter podcast. The Cancer Letter is a weekly independent magazine covering oncology since 1973. I’m your host, Paul Goldberg, editor and publisher of The Cancer Letter.
Jacquelyn Cobb (01:40): And I’m your host, Jacquelyn Cobb, associate editor of The Cancer Letter. We’ll be bringing you the latest stories, groundbreaking research, and critical conversations shaping oncology.
Paul Goldberg (01:51): So, let’s get going.
Jacquelyn Cobb (02:00): Claire, it’s so good to have you here. First time on the podcast; very exciting. We were talking before about how Claire’s really representing TCL with her red lipstick and her red shirt and her red TCL mug and her red phone. So, we were really giggling about that, how she’s really representing here.
I technically have some red on, but it’s not the right shade. And our mug is available in our store if you feel so inclined to represent with us.
But yeah, I’m very happy to have you here, Claire. Paul is off cross country skiing right now, so he has a very good excuse for not being here. We’re all very jealous, I think.
I will walk us through the headlines from last week. Paul, he reported on the FY25 budget resolution that the House Republicans narrowly pushed through last week.
That’s our cover story. It was also sort of a roundup, but that was definitely the focus of the story. The resolution includes tax cuts and budgetary deficits, and if the Senate agrees, NIH would likely experience significant funding cuts. So, definitely something to keep an eye on as it moves through Congress.
Former NCI director Kim Rathmell wrote another installment of her weekly column last week. This time it was about the importance of bidirectional communication between cancer researchers and the public, especially as March comes around and its Kidney Cancer Awareness Month.
Harpreet Singh wrote about FDA’s evolving position on cancer biomarkers for drug development after the ODAC meeting last summer that was concerned with PD-L1 as a biomarker. We featured another interview in honor of Black History Month between Sherwood McClellan III, chief medical officer of Cancer Health Equity at the University of Oklahoma Stevenson Cancer Center, and a recipient of the Robert A. Winn Excellence in Cancer Trials: Career Development Award. Robert Winn—Robert Winn of the Robert A. Winn Excellence in Cancer da-da-da Award—who is also director of the VCU Massey Cancer Center and guest editor of The Cancer Letter during Black History Month, interviewed him for the story.
We began an informal series in our “In the Archives” section, where the Cancer History Project will be preserving and highlighting the FDA oral histories that have been taken down in an apparent effort to comply with the Trump administration’s order to purge government websites containing anything related to diversity, equity, inclusion, or gender.
Last week, we started with the oral history of Peter Greenwald, who helped to start the NCI Division of Cancer Control and Prevention and stayed the director until his retirement in 2011.
Finally, we come to the story that we’ll be diving into this week. Our reporter, Claire, who is joining us this week, had an in-depth conversation with one of the probationary employees who were terminated as part of the mass firings happening throughout HHS over the past few weeks.
Claire, please tell us about the story. I know there’s a lot to dive into, a lot to talk about, but please just give us a summary to begin with.
Claire Marie Porter (05:02): Sure. So, we had really wanted to find someone who would speak on or off the record about the emotional and human toll of these terminations, these mass firings. So, I was searching on social media and was able to find a person who was willing to speak on the basis of anonymity.
So, we’re using the pseudonym Taylor and gender neutral pronouns to talk about them. So, the story is about this NCI fellow who recently was hired in their dream job at NCI. They were just seven days back from parental leave when they received this termination email on a Saturday evening. They were mere weeks from the end of their probationary period, which would ensure job safety. So, the timing was just kind of absurd. And of course, the language of the email was kind of the “copy-and-paste” that all of these probationary employees were receiving.
Something along the lines of, “You’re unfit for this position.” Which Taylor told me was completely absurd and baseless, because they had only received exemplary reviews on their performance and had had great feedback. So, it was really shocking and really sad. They’re working right now with a legal team on a daily basis in hopes of reinstating this job. It seems there’s maybe a glimmer of hope, it has happened to some federal employees, but it’s kind of a wait-and-see thing right now.
Jacquelyn Cobb (06:46): Forgive me if I’m wrong, but it’s happened for six employees, and there’ve been thousands fired; right? Is that correct?
Claire Marie Porter (06:54): As of the publishing of last week’s issue, it had been six from six different agencies. I don’t know if that number has been updated yet.
Jacquelyn Cobb (07:01): So, there’s definitely hope, but a lot of uncertainty and a lot of fear as well.
Claire Marie Porter (07:06): Yeah. Taylor described this position as kind of a dream job situation, and this fairytale experience. They recognized the fact that a lot of people can’t say that. So, just adding insult to injury.
Jacquelyn Cobb (07:23): It’s so sad. And it wasn’t easy for Taylor to decide to talk to us; right? You said that they’re speaking with their legal counsel every day. It’s a very sensitive period right now; right?
Claire Marie Porter (07:39): Yeah, they were a little bit hesitant. They really wanted to elevate these stories but needed to take some time to determine whether or not it was safe to do so, and how much detail to include and in what capacity. So, they decided that anonymity would be fine and removal of identifying bits of information. But yeah, they were hoping to go on the record initially and then decided not to, but we kind of realized that making Taylor anonymous worked really well, because their story is kind of exemplary of so many other stories. They’re not the only one with just weeks or months left in their probationary period. So, it kind of ended up working out that they spoke for a lot of people.
Jacquelyn Cobb (08:34): And especially since everybody or almost everybody got this same letter, which is I think again, just such a big part of the story, Taylor was getting exemplary reviews and was doing so wonderfully and then gets a letter saying they’re unfit. It’s just insulting.
Claire Marie Porter (08:52): Right. Absolutely. That’s the story of hundreds, if not thousands of people—is that they’ve only had good reviews and then they got this kind of shocking email and then realized it was the same email that everyone else was also getting. So, I just wanted to mention that the federal firings, they’re the work of the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE, which is headed by Elon Musk. Just for context, he has been kind of tearing through these agencies over the last couple of weeks in search of what he considers to be excess or waste, were the words that he used.
Claire Marie Porter (09:22): And there’s no real, there’s no reliable tally of the firings as of today. We know the list stretches into the thousands and it’s nationwide into nearly every part of the country. And about 5,200 of those are HHS employees, but we don’t have an official tally yet.
Jacquelyn Cobb (09:37): Yeah. And I think I was surprised—I just didn’t know this personally, I know it’s a little bit off topic—but that 80% of federal workers are not in Washington. It really is a nationwide issue. This isn’t just localized to Washington.
Claire Marie Porter (09:51): Yeah, exactly.
Jacquelyn Cobb (09:53): So interesting.
Claire Marie Porter (09:55): Yeah.
Jacquelyn Cobb (09:55): So, I’d like to just return to Taylor a little bit and just say that they have expressed that they would like to return to their job. Obviously, it’s a dream job. So many of the quotes are really powerful there. But even if they do get their job back, they are one of the lucky ones, or maybe some more widespread or general change happens—I know that there were some unions getting involved as well—but even if they do, it might not be all that it was. The entire atmosphere of the situation is changing.
Claire Marie Porter (10:29): Right, right. They mentioned that just the increased surveillance and oversight…It just feels very punitive. Government employees obviously have a very strict adherence to—I’m forgetting the word—contract obligations. I’ll have to check back. Anyways, federal employees already go through this rigorous process to become government employees. So, just this increased oversight is just a bit humiliating, I think.
Also just the fact that there’s this new kind of tenor of distrust and mistrust of federal employees. Taylor did say that it just won’t be the same. And that’s disappointing.
Jacquelyn Cobb (11:22): Yeah, absolutely. I also was shocked to read—again, this is maybe a little bit tangential, but obviously very relevant—about when Musk issued an ultimatum to remaining employees where he threatened that they could lose their jobs if they didn’t respond to a mass email saying you need to list five things you accomplished this week.
And then just the back and forth between—I forget—somebody said, “No, you don’t have to do that.” And then Trump was like, “Well, you might be fired if you don’t.” Just the back and forth. So confusing, so stressful, so scary. All of these things are just like…
Claire Marie Porter (12:04): Right. There were these few days last week where there was just back-and-forth information, and no one was quite sure what to do. And people were being advised to do one thing, and then a couple hours later were advised to do something else. And Trump said, we mentioned this in the story, he said, “You might be fired if you don’t respond with these five accomplishments.”
But for a lot of people, listing five accomplishments is a privacy issue. They can’t. So, it was a good bit of chaos there in the middle of the week.
Jacquelyn Cobb (12:40): Terrible.
Well, I want to just switch over to something we haven’t done before, but again, because this is such a human-focused story, our producer, Imani, was able to distort Taylor’s voice so that we can hear how the situation has affected them in their own words. And like I said, this is so important because in a story like this, this situation has such a human cost. So, we’d love for you to take a listen:
Taylor (13:06): There is constant tension and worry about who’s next? Who’s coming? Who will be in the next reduction in force? Should we be looking for other positions? That’s sad, because these individuals have dedicated their whole careers to this.
I truly thought this would be my whole career. I thought I would start as a junior scientist, an investigator in government science, and be one of those people in my late sixties or seventies saying,
‘I’ve helped trainees, I’ve helped patients, I’ve helped steer research agendas, I’ve created ultimate outcomes,’ and looked back on a career and said, ‘yes, this was the most satisfying job I could have ever had.’
And I don’t know if I’ll get that back. And certainly right now—I’m not allowed to live out that kind of fantasy.
You know, think about it. The individuals that are being let go, these are people that have dedicated their lives to training and service. And we have loads of student loans from a lot of education, and it’s like, “Now what do we do?”
Jacquelyn Cobb (14:22): So, Taylor had a really interesting point in one of their quotes where they say “Cancer is a bipartisan issue, or at least I thought it was.”
And, you know, being at The Cancer Letter, covering oncology since the signing of the National Cancer Act in 1971, it’s always been a bipartisan issue, or a bipartisan cause. The National Cancer Act was introduced by a Democrat and signed by a Republican, and this type of bipartisanship has continued since then. And it’s probably jarring for a lot of people who are governmental scientists who are used to that sort of status quo and now facing a lot more political divide in their work.
Claire Marie Porter (15:05): Right. And I think what Taylor was suggesting is that everyone is affected by cancer in some way, whether personally or professionally. And so, this is not just about how it’s going to affect them and their career trajectory, but how it’s going to affect the oncology community at large.
Jacquelyn Cobb (15:32): Absolutely. And we dove into that a little bit in past issues as well as this story, about how it’s affecting the community at large right now. It’s affecting the potential next generation of scientists as they consider going into this field. The effects are far-reaching and severe. So, definitely hoping to see some sort of turnaround, don’t know how much we can actually hope for that, but at least for these employees, hopefully some legal action to help them get their jobs back, and maybe a little bit more security.
Claire Marie Porter (16:07): Absolutely. They are public servants, after all.
Jacquelyn Cobb (16:10): Yes, exactly. Well, thank you so much, Claire, for joining us. I’m sure we’ll have you back on soon, and it was an absolute pleasure.
Claire Marie Porter (16:18): My pleasure too.
Jacquelyn Cobb (16:19): Thank you for joining us on The Cancer Letter Podcast, where we explore the stories shaping the future of oncology. For more in-depth reporting and analysis, visit us at cancerletter.com. With over 200 site license subscriptions, you may already have access through your workplace. If you found this episode valuable, don’t forget to subscribe, rate, and share. Together, we’ll keep the conversation going.
Paul Goldberg (16:42): Until next time, stay informed, stay engaged, and thank you for listening.
