Anti-Trump media gadfly at NIH put on paid leave for 2nd investigation since pandemic: director

A vocal critic of the Trump administration within the National Institutes of Health publicly shared an essay that calls for "individualized, person-to-person acts of political and social resistance" to stop President Trump and valorizes those "willing to 'break the law' when the law is evil."

"To do nothing is to be complicit in the horrors we are visiting upon the world" and "small, individual acts of noncompliance are also tools that can frustrate great and evil powers," Jenna Norton, program director in the NIH's Division of Kidney, Urologic, & Hematologic Diseases, wrote on Bluesky Aug. 31, quoting The Nation's Elie Mystal.  

Ten weeks and much more public criticism of the administration later, Norton was put on "non-disciplinary" administrative leave as of 2 p.m. Thursday, she said that night in a TikTok video that has drawn nearly 1,500 comments as of Friday afternoon, using air quotes to describe the form of leave. 

"I was not given a reason … but I strongly suspect it is because I have been speaking up in my personal capacity about the harms that I've been witnessing," Norton said, apparently reading from an oft-redundant written statement off-camera. 

The move was "designed to scare and silence my colleagues, and it was designed to scare and silence everyone in the public, but I am not scared and I will not be silenced," she said. 

"I will keep on sharing here the harms that my many friends inside the agency" – Norton pauses awkwardly here – "will be witnessing, I suspect, in the coming months," she said. "If anything," the administrative leave "just reaffirms my commitment to this fight," which she hopes her followers join.

"This was retaliation for speaking up. Moves like this are designed to silence us," Norton, who calls herself a "Health Equity Scientist," wrote on Bluesky, the platform of choice for anti-Trump resistance figures and political progressives.

"Instead of focusing on her actual job to promote gold standard science, radical leftist Jenna Norton chooses to constantly criticize this administration, even when she is supposed to be working," an unnamed Department of Health and Human Services official told STAT when asked why Norton was put on leave.

The NIH human resources email that Norton shared with STAT says the leave, with "full pay and benefits," has "no disciplinary purpose." It also cut off her email access, leaving Just the News one known way to reach her, through her social media accounts, and she did not answer queries left as comments on her oft-used Bluesky and sporadically used X accounts. 

David Dayen, executive editor of the liberal magazine The American Prospect, wrote on Bluesky that Norton was the first NIH staffer to be put on leave for criticizing Trump policies. "I was given the name of an HHS attorney I could contact with questions," she responded.

NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya told Just the News Friday night this is actually the second investigation of Norton.

"HHS started an an [sic] investigation of her activities during the pandemic for potentially violating the anti-deficiency act," he wrote in a direct message, referring to the federal law prohibiting employees from "obligating or expending federal funds in advance or in excess of an appropriation, and from accepting voluntary services."

"She also potentially violated NIH policy regarding comms, which are now centralized out of the Office of the Director," Bhattacharya said.

Talking to media in her 'personal capacity,' without authorization

If Norton goes to court, she will have to convince a judge she's speaking as a private citizen – her Bluesky and TikTok profiles say she speaks in her "personal capacity" – rather than pursuant to her official duties as a government administrator, the latter of which is not protected by the First Amendment under a 2006 Supreme Court ruling. 

The Garcetti precedent is often invoked by public educational institutions against employees who diverge from their orthodoxy on hot-button issues such as immigration, religion, race and gender identity, but the high court said it might not apply to speech related to scholarship or teaching, which several appeals courts have since explicitly protected.

Two Oregon educators fired for advocating against proposed gender identity policies received a $650,000 settlement, their lawyers said this week, five months after their lawsuit's reinstatement over factual disputes including whether the duo promoted their "I Resolve" campaign on the clock and not just during authorized personal breaks at school.

The Grants Pass School District agreed to pay Rachel Sager and Katie Medart damages and attorneys’ fees, publicly admit their firing "fell short of its standards and responsibilities," give them "positive letters of recommendation" and "remove negative references from their personnel files," and revise its policy to comply with the First Amendment.

Norton does not enjoy scientific freedom as a program officer and is on leave "for giving media interviews about NIH policies," a role reserved for "the comms department," former Senate pharmaceutical payola investigator Paul Thacker wrote on X, telling Just the News that an NIH official told Thacker the scientific-freedom defense is "likely her play."

"She's not in a scientist position, so the academic freedom policy regarding scientific communications does not apply to her," Bhattacharya told Just the News.

HHS didn't answer queries on the apparent disconnect between the NIH human resources email, which alleged no misconduct, and the HHS official who portrayed Norton to STAT and The New York Times as neglecting her paid duties, which would likely constitute legal grounds for dismissal. 

"To my knowledge I haven’t done anything wrong," she told the Times.

Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright, who previously accused Biden administration NIH officials of lying to the public and defended the Trump administration's 15% cap on indirect cost rate agreements, was not surprised by Norton's behavior. 

"Misfeasant idiot DEI hires--like Norton--will be misfeasant idiot DEI hires," Ebright wrote on X, meaning Norton wrongfully exercised lawful authority and was a diversity hire.

Only declaration signatory place on leave

Mainstream media coverage of Norton's leave has not fully detailed how she has publicly described resisting the administration, instead emphasizing her role in organizing the Bethesda Declaration, a list of grievances to Bhattacharya signed by hundreds of NIH staff that is named after NIH headquarters.

Bhattacharya did not retaliate against signatories, saying "respectful dissent in science is productive," and met with several of them this summer "but Norton was not invited to the meeting," according to STAT. 

The medical trade publication said "multiple sources" told STAT other signatories "who have been publicly critical of the administration have not been placed on leave." Norton has repeatedly blamed HHS for the alleged retaliation, though she has twice reposted Bluesky commenters who blame Bhattacharya.

Thacker dug into Norton's public commentary, including sharing Mystal's "break the law" essay on Bluesky – which called the U.S. government "a force for evil" and proposed "sabotag[ing] our government’s efforts" – and her NPR interview Oct. 7 trashing the administration while furloughed during the government shutdown.

Just the News preserved the past three weeks of Norton's Bluesky posts, given that one of the platform's biggest distinctives is the ease in hiding posts from unwanted followers, including through third-party blocklists. (Politico senior staff writer Michael Kruse wrote a first-person essay on his inexplicable Bluesky ban last year.)

At a pre-shutdown U.S. Capitol press conference, Norton called on Congress to "stop the gutting of public services Americans depend on," given the Supreme Court's allowance for Trump's agenda to largely move forward, NPR reported.

"I mean, if some general doesn't like DOD policy in the Middle East, do you think he still has a job if he runs to NPR to complain?" Thacker mused.

Norton told NPR she knows NIH policy prohibits unauthorized staff speaking to the media and that she could be fired, but believes she has both a right and obligation to speak out about her "front row seat to the destruction of our democracy" at the hands of a president "asking us to do things that are illegal and harmful to the American public."

Her TikTok account has nearly 6,000 followers, and she has made 25 videos just since Oct. 5, when she recorded her first two videos recounting "what I didn't get to say" in an MSNBC interview that day about "Trump's shutdown."