Sylvia Chou had been with the National Institutes of Health for 18 years when she decided to resign in January 2026, 1 year after the second Trump Administration took office. At the time of her resignation, she was serving as a program director at the NIH’s National Cancer Institute, and her specialty was health communication. One of her areas of expertise, health misinformation, became a topic that was more relevant than ever at the end of her career at NIH.

Over the course of 2025, top–down directives brought significant changes to NIH’s grant funding policies and infrastructures, curtailing the independence and integrity that had long defined the institution. These directives dictated what kind of science was deemed acceptable, how funding decisions were made, and how health information could be communicated to the public. They also brought significant disruptions to NIH’s workforce. Since January 2025, NIH has lost over a fifth of its workforce because of layoffs, resignations, and early retirements, causing generational expertise to disappear.

Along with a group of her colleagues at NIH, Chou helped to organize the Bethesda Declaration, a letter signed by nearly 500 NIH employees in June 2025 that advocated for the protection of scientific integrity, academic freedom, and restoration of politically disrupted research funding. One year later, the same group issued a follow-up to this declaration, writing that “the chaos of 2025 has been replaced with coordinated, systematic, institutionalized destruction in 2026.”

Chou was one of roughly 90 people who signed the Bethesda Declaration by name and has chosen to speak publicly about her experience as a federal worker navigating this turmoil. From this vantage point, the Observer’s Managing Editor Hannah O. Brown talked with Chou about her experience on the frontlines of a historic disruption of scientific research.