When she succeeded Anthony Fauci as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Jeanne Marrazzo felt that she’d landed “probably the most important infectious-disease job in the world,” she told me. After decades of working in academia, she now had the power to influence, nationwide, the science she knew best—overseeing 4,500 employees at a $6.5 billion institute, the second largest by budget at the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research.
Marrazzo had been on the job for only a year and a half, however, when the Trump administration placed her on administrative leave. She lost access to the NIH campus and, at least through official channels, to her staff, she told me; she could no longer sign into her laptop or phone. On paper, she would remain NIAID’s official director, but in practice she had been pushed out.
That was at the beginning of April. In a near instant, she went from days filled, morning ’til evening, with meetings, phone calls, and lively scientific discussions to “no structure,” she told me. The first month or two, she “was too stunned to do much” at all, she said, beyond wrestling with feelings of humiliation over the situation she’d been forced into.
Marrazzo isn’t alone in purgatory. She is one of roughly 100 officials whom the Department of Health and Human Services placed on administrative leave—or sent to, as some of them call it, HHS’s rubber room—in the winter or in spring, without explanation or a sense of when or how their status might change, according to a senior HHS official with direct knowledge of their circumstances. (Several of the HHS officials I spoke with requested anonymity to avoid retaliation from the Trump administration.)
Their status is distinct from that of many HHS employees who remain on leave as part of the administration’s deferred resignation program (who will be out of their jobs at the end of September), or who were part of a reduction in workforce and are stuck in limbo as litigation stalls their termination. But together, all of these on-leave officials constitute a group of thousands, estimates Abigail André, the executive director of the Impact Project, which has been tracking federal workers’ fates during President Donald Trump’s second term.
Their sheer number suggests that the United States government has spent tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars since the start of April on idled health workers. “I’m being paid to not work,” Aryn Backus, a health-communications specialist with the CDC’s now-dismantled Office on Smoking and Health who has been on leave for months as part of the contested reduction in workforce, told me. In some cases, federal officials are being paid a lot to not work. I spoke with nearly a dozen officials indefinitely stuck in the rubber room whose annual salaries range from about $150,000 to $400,000. (When reached over email, HHS Press Secretary Emily G. Hilliard declined to respond to my questions about officials who remain on administrative leave, citing a restraining order and providing no further context when asked.)
In the past, administrative leave from the federal government has generally been used as a designation employers can assign when allegations about an employee’s performance or conduct have been raised. It has been known to drag out before—in some cases, for years, amid lengthy personnel investigations. But as a rule, prolonging administrative leave past a few days is regarded as “just not an appropriate use of taxpayer dollars,” one senior NIH official told me. And what’s played out recently—leaving dozens of people on administrative leave for months, in the absence of alleged misconduct and without a clear path toward resolution—is unheard of, a senior NIH official who has been on administrative leave since the spring told me. In July, the Office of Personnel Management released new guidance, effective in 2026, that will limit administrative leave connected to workforce reassignment to 12 weeks. But it did not specify whether that time limit, which can be jointly waived by OPM and the Office of Management and Budget, would apply retroactively to officials who have been on leave for months already. (OPM and OMB did not respond to a request for comment.)
Firing federal employees is generally difficult, especially without clear cause. That stability minimizes turnover, even when administrations shift. But the Trump White House has used administrative leave as a workaround, seemingly as a way to select the individuals they are most eager to prune, officials told me. For many senior HHS officials, in particular, placement on administrative leave “was just a pretext to get us out of the office,” Emily Erbelding, the director of the Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at NIAID, who has been on administrative leave since April, told me. This way, as she sees it, the Trump administration wouldn’t risk being sued for wrongful termination, but could nudge officials toward resigning on their own.
Once the department places officials on leave, its options are limited, the senior NIH official told me: It “can keep us, fire us illegally, or reassign us and have us quit.” So far it’s mostly just ignored them. On March 4, all seven former members of the NIH’s now-defunct Sexual and Gender Minority Research Office were put on administrative leave on vague terms: No potential reassignments were mentioned, and none of the officials have received correspondence from the agency or department since, two officials told me. A few weeks later, dozens of officials across HHS—many of them in leadership roles, including Marrazzo and the directors of several other institutes, divisions, and centers—were told that they would be put on leave, and that the department was proposing to reassign them, several officials told me. The notice also mentioned that the Indian Health Service was “a critical area of need.” At the end of August, a small number of those people received notice that they had been reassigned to a Health Resources and Services Administration position in Missouri, three officials told me. At least one of them chose to retire instead. But most of those who were sent the Indian Health Service letter received only a request for their CVs in the spring, and have heard nothing since.
These officials say they were never given an explanation for being put on leave. Many of them focused on topics that the administration has said it doesn’t want to fund (infectious disease, HIV, sexual health, DEI, gender research) or led institutes that the administration or Republican members of Congress have proposed altering, eliminating, or consolidating. NIAID’s leadership was especially hard-hit, and several officials I spoke with saw those leave placements as part of the administration’s revenge campaign against the U.S.’s response to COVID, and the public-health experts who drove it, Fauci among them. (Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, was also among the NIH officials placed on administrative leave in April; she chose to retire.) In Erbelding’s case, she told me she suspects that the administration may have singled her out in part because she led a division that had awarded funds to the Wuhan virology lab at the center of the controversial lab-leak theory on the pandemic’s origins, which Trump and his allies have embraced as fact. NIAID had also been one of the institutes most vocally challenging the administration’s funding cuts. Marrazzo knew she had a target on her back: As early as February, she told me, she stopped furnishing her office with personal items, anticipating that she’d soon have to port them home again. (Earlier this month, Marrazzo and Kathleen Neuzil, who once directed the NIH’s Fogarty International Center and was placed on leave under similar circumstances as Marrazzo, sent whistleblower complaints to the Office of Special Counsel, accusing the Trump administration of illegally forcing them out of their jobs.)
Some officials, like Grady, have retired, while others, like Neuzil, have found positions outside of government and resigned. But the administration’s actions have also made their particular job market tough, Aryn Backus told me. Universities have been stripped of funding; pharmaceutical companies are wary of the FDA’s shifting regulatory landscape. All of the officials I spoke with told me they’d been actively seeking other employment for months, but had found few prospects. Multiple senior NIH officials also told me that the agency has made their job search harder. As employees, they still need approval from their supervisor to give talks, volunteer, or otherwise participate in events related to biomedical research. But some have struggled to get it, they told me. The clearest explanation they’ve received, from ethics officials who help manage such requests, is that Matt Memoli, the NIH’s principal deputy director, to whom several of them still report, has insisted that the rubber-room officials submitting these requests have been reassigned and are no longer under his purview. “Leadership is not acknowledging that we report to them, so they are not responding or approving,” one of those officials told me.
In theory, some of these officials could still return to their jobs. Backus joked that she feels snared in a prolonged situationship with the federal government: “It’s like waiting for my toxic ex to call.” But for now, she doesn’t have a position to return to, because the administration eliminated the office she was part of. Others, like Marrazzo, don’t see the appeal anymore. Running an institute at the NIH once meant deciding how to guide the country’s investment in health research, based primarily on the needs of the public and on the merit of the projects being funded; that job functionally no longer exists, she said. And under politicized leadership at HHS, “going back there right now sounds awful,” the senior NIH official told me. “My worst nightmare.”
The occupants of the rubber room do recognize that their situation—paid leave—could be worse. Some told me they will not resign: If the Trump administration wants them out so badly, it must cut them. “I want to force them to come up with an exceptional reason why I’m not good enough to keep serving the American people,” one official told me. But being stuck in limbo also has costs. As a scientist who has now, for months, been unable to present at national conferences or publish scientific papers—the core products of research—“my self-esteem is in the dumpster,” that official said. And, multiple officials told me, their lawyers say that they don’t have sufficient grounds to sue HHS over damages such as wrongful termination, unlike those who have been officially separated from their jobs.
Five and a half months in, Marrazzo is now filling her days with what productivity she can: traveling, speaking, job hunting—and far more reading, birding, and “thinking about next steps” than she has ever been accustomed to. It doesn’t feel like enough. “I’ve never not worked,” she told me. “It feels like slacking.” And her status haunts her. She regularly encounters people who are surprised to learn that she is still on administrative leave: They assume that she resigned, or was fired by the administration. The NIH has appointed an acting director to lead NIAID in her absence; the institute’s website currently lists her as the former director. She’ll gently correct people who call her that; at the same time, “I don’t know how to introduce myself,” she said. When she gives talks, she lists herself as the institute’s director on her introduction slide, and appends an asterisk that notes that she’s on leave. Officially, the title is still hers. But she is no longer quite sure what that means.