First off, what would you like me to call you, and where are you located? We can use a pseudonym or initials, and region is fine, I don’t need specific location.
Nate Brought, Maryland. I would prefer you use my full name. I want these bastards to know it was me.
What do you do?
I am the Director of the Executive Secretariat at the National Institutes of Health until COB Friday, February 28.
My office handles documents to be approved by the Director and Deputy Director, incoming and outgoing correspondence, coordinating drafting and clearance on all types of documents including Congressional reports, Congressional letters, committee assignments and charters, HR packages requiring front office approval, and about a hundred other different product lines. We also handle records management compliance for the director and deputy director, as well as managing their email inboxes, and sending all-staff messages.
How did you enter federal service?
It’s probably easier to show you this.
Note: If you don’t have a LinkedIn account, you can view Nate’s letter here.
What was important to you about the work you were doing?
I viewed myself as having 2 primary roles:
- Protecting the legacy and reputation of NIH, the NIH Director, and the NIH Deputy Director by ensuring that their records were managed in accordance with all regulations, and ensuring that everything they approved was consistent, legal, and done to the highest caliber.
- Taking care of my employees in the office policies I set, my interactions with them, by representing their interests well to those above me, and through coaching, training, and mentoring.
Obviously, I believed in the mission of NIH and it was important to me, and serving those two roles was my primary way of serving the Agency mission.
What is important to Americans about the work you were doing?
Most immediately, if you wrote a letter to NIH, we were the ones who received it, made sure it got to the right place, made sure you got a thorough, complete, accurate, and legal response that has been coordinated with everyone necessary across the agency, and that it made its way back to you. In the bigger scheme of things, we are the grease on the gears of NIH. If things aren’t moving efficiently through my team, NIH’s ability to interact with anyone outside NIH would be severely limited, and many things simply wouldn’t be able to get done. There are a lot of things that can’t go out without the Director or the Deputy Director’s signature, and those folks are too busy to keep track of a hundred different people sending them those things. But they knew me and they knew my emails were important. Also, a lot of times things get submitted for approval that are less-than-ready for publication, or are inconsistent with other documents. We are editing experts and we ensure that everything that goes out is in a consistent “NIH Voice.” Even the director’s ability to communicate inside of NIH would be severely degraded. We handle sending out his all staff messages. We handle a lot of his email. We make sure that he gets back to people if he forgets.
We also handle FOIA requests for DIR and DDIR records though, and we did a lot of work on the Republicans’ wild goose chases. We knew they were bullshit, and we knew they were fruitless, and we knew they were going to try to use the results to hurt us, but my staff faithfully located, categorized, and provided every single responsive record every single time, even when MY records were requested.
Fortunately, I was not at NIH until August of 2023, so my predecessor dealt with a lot of communications during covid, and comforted my staff through the death and rape threats they received by phone and email on a daily basis throughout that period. The worst part is the right never stopped sending those threats, and now we’re getting them from people on the other side, because they’re upset about funding freezes and indirect costs issues.
On a personal note, my favorite workdays were hearing prep days. I’ve had to watch a LOT of congressional testimony over the years for work, and getting to participate in the mock hearings was always extremely fun. Apparently I’m pretty good at it, because after the last one I did a couple people asked about my acting experience. The key is to just be as one-sided and disingenuous as possible and you’ll nail your impression of most anyone on the Hill.
What does all of this chaos and dysfunction mean to you? Do you have a sense of how it’s all going to impact your work and your mission?
I think if Republicans in Congress don’t act soon, this is an existential threat to the America that has existed since 1776 and we are damn near Trump realizing his dream of Putinizing America. I honestly, 100% believe if he’s not removed from office soon, 2024 will be our last free and fair election.
But let’s just assume for a second that things don’t get that bad. The relationship between the people who do the work of the government and the government has been irreparably harmed, which will absolutely degrade the mission and is already leading to severe brain drain. They’re, all of a sudden, putting out a bunch of job ads for critical skills, many of which they just fired people out of, and I guarantee you nobody is going for those spots unless they have no other choice. The government has turned its recruitment efforts away from “the best and the brightest” and towards the lowest bidder.
And degrading the NIH mission? That doesn’t just harm the American people. That harms the entire world. The medical advances that NIH makes benefit people on every continent and in just about every country. Like, I imagine North Korea and a couple of other places aren’t really up to the latest and greatest on the results of our research, but every other country benefits from the medical advances that we make. Millions of people will die unnecessarily in the coming decades because of the damage that we’re doing to scientific research, and the way we are degrading our reputation by letting somebody like RFK Jr lead the department.
For me, the most serious concern, and the biggest reason I resigned, is the ways in that they’re already refusing to comply with the courts. It’s anathema to US ideals and the separation of powers, and it potentially leads us somewhere even worse. At NIH, it’s most obvious through the FRN issue right now, but you can also just look at the statements they’ve made over the last few weeks.
These are not minor issues, or normal political squabbling. These are things that, if they happen or they’re not stopped, will absolutely bring about the downfall of American democracy as we’ve always known it. People need to wake up to the fact that the fate of the country is literally at risk. People need to get out of the headspace that they can just tune out the news and none of this will matter or impact them. To borrow a phrase from Donald Trump, “you’ve got to fight like hell or you’re not going to have a country anymore.” The only two hopes of stopping this right now are Republicans in Congress doing what they should be doing and getting him out of there, and then all of us moving forward into a world where it’s not Party-Line-Or-Nothing. Or, senior military leaders and a coup, which isn’t really a road we want to go down either, and potentially leads somewhere much worse.
I suppose you could argue that some sort of “amicable divorce” with a mutual defense treaty between the red States and blue States might be possible, but they’d never allow that to happen. They’re in the standard fascist playbook of expansionism right now, so there’s no way they’re going to give up control over any territory.
Anyhow. I could literally talk about this for 5 hours so I’ll stop there.
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