Last November, in the days following Donald Trump’s election, leaders at the National Institutes of Health began discussing how to prepare for the coming administration. Any presidential transition comes with uncertainty. But with the conservative policy playbook known as Project 2025 proposing that “the NIH monopoly on directing research should be broken,” rumors had begun to fly.

Could the incoming Trump administration invoke Schedule F and make many more agency employees political appointees? Could it dismiss the directors of the agency’s 27 institutes in one sweeping move? Could it relocate some of those institutes and send them into disarray?

“There were a whole set of possible circumstances that we were being told about,” said Michael Lauer, who was, until February, in charge

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