By Brenda Goodman and Meg Tirrell, CNN

(CNN) — Scientists at the National Institutes of Health have been told the communications pause announced by the Trump Administration earlier this week includes a pause on all purchasing, including supplies for their ongoing studies, according to four sources inside the agency with knowledge of the purchasing hold.

The supply crunch follows a directive first issued on Tuesday by the acting director of the Department of Health and Human Services, which placed a moratorium on the release of any public communication until it had been reviewed by officials appointed or designated by the Trump Administration, according to an internal memo obtained by CNN. Part of this pause on public communication has been widely interpreted to include purchasing orders to outside suppliers. One source noted they had been told that essential requests can proceed and will be reviewed daily.

Researchers who have clinical trial participants staying at the NIH’s on-campus hospital, the Clinical Trial Center, said they weren’t able to order test tubes to draw blood as well as other key study components. If something doesn’t change, one researcher who was affected said his study will run out of key supplies by next week. If that happens, the research results would be compromised, and he would have to recruit new patients, he said.

CNN is not naming the scientists because they were not authorized to speak with the media.

While it’s unclear if the communications moratorium was intended to affect purchasing supplies for NIH research, outside experts said the motivation wasn’t all that important.

“It’s difficult to tell if what’s going on is rank incompetence or a willful attempt to throw sand in the gears, but it really could be either, neither reflects well on them,” said Dr. Peter Lurie, who is president and executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Dr. Lurie was previously an official at the US Food and Drug Administration.

The clinical center only has a few weeks of medication on hand, according to a source who had knowledge of the pharmaceutical supply but was not authorized to speak with reporters.

Other studies are in danger of running out of supplies like animal feed or liquid nitrogen to cool samples, researchers said.

The communications pause also affects contractors working on campus. This includes lab workers, information technology staff who keep the computers running, as well as those who run security at the gates. If their contracts expire before February 1, they are at risk of losing their jobs because renewing those contracts would require outside communication, according to a source familiar with the situation who was not authorized to speak to reporters.

One scientist at the agency said this week has been the hardest of their working lives, worse even than working during the Covid response. They said it has been a week filled with confusion and chaos, trying to respond to different orders, understand what they mean, and worry that they and their co-workers could lose their jobs, in addition to trying to do research in the midst of the disruption.

The researchers said that while some confusion was to be expected as administrations change, this was entirely different and felt hostile.

One scientist, who has been at NIH for more than 20 years, said he had never seen anything like this before. “It feels more like a government shutdown,” he said.

The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.