Top U.S. Scientific Misconduct Official Quits in Frustration With Bureaucracy
Dr. Howard Koh, M.D.
Assistant Secretary for Health
Dear Howard:
I am writing to resign my position as Director, Office of Research Integrity, ORI/OASH/DHHS
This has been at once the best and worst job I’ve ever had. The best part of it has been the opportunity to lead ORI intellectually and professionally in helping research institutions better handle allegations of research misconduct, provide in-service training for institutional Research Integrity Officers (RIOs), and develop programming to promote the Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR). Working with members of the research community, particularly RIOs, and the brilliant scientist-investigators in ORI has been one of the great pleasures of my long career. Unfortunately, and to my great surprise, it turned out to be only about 35% of the job.
The rest of my role as ORI Director has been the very worst job I have ever had and it occupies up to 65% of my time. That part of the job is spent navigating the remarkably dysfunctional HHS bureaucracy to secure resources and, yes, get permission for ORI to serve the research community. I knew coming into this job about the bureaucratic limitations of the federal government, but I had no idea how stifling it would be. What I was able to do in a day or two as an academic administrator takes weeks or months in the federal government, our precinct of which is OASH.
...On one occasion, I was invited to give a talk on research integrity and misconduct to a large group of AAAS fellows. I needed to spend $35 to convert some old cassette tapes to CDs for use in the presentation. The immediate office denied my request after a couple of days of noodling. A university did the conversion for me in twenty minutes, and refused payment when I told them it was for an educational purpose....
...Third, there is the nature of the federal bureaucracy itself. The sociologist Max Weber observed in the early 20th century that while bureaucracy is in some instances an optimal organizational mode for a rationalized, industrial society, it has drawbacks. One is that public bureaucracies quit being about serving the public and focus instead on perpetuating themselves. This is exactly my experience with OASH. We spend exorbitant amounts of time in meetings and in generating repetitive and often meaningless data and reports to make our precinct of the bureaucracy look productive. None of this renders the slightest bit of assistance to ORI in handling allegations of misconduct or in promoting the responsible conduct of research. Instead, it sucks away time and resources that we might better use to meet our mission. Since I’ve been here I’ve been advised by my superiors that I had “to make my bosses look good.” I’ve been admonished: “Dave, you are a visionary leader but what we need here are team players.” Recently, I was advised that if I wanted to be happy in government service, I had to “lower my expectations.” The one thing no one in OASH leadership has said to me in two years is ‘how can we help ORI better serve the research community?’ Not once....
My friend Darren mentioned how he is trusted with tens of thousands in equipment but not trusted to turn out the lights. I've remembered how my agency needed to replace three hundred computers a few years back. This was a legitimate need, the laptops they were replacing were over ten years old. Now these are systems needed primarily to run a DOS based program that had a Windows interface so we really didn't need high end machines. I could walk into a Best Buy or Fry's Electronics and request a bulk purchase and get good machines with a site license of Windows Office for around 500 each. But no, we can't have that. We need to use minority/women owned contractors, etc. first. This ended up costing a half-million dollars for 300 systems. Yes, over 1700 each. What a waste.
And this is the experience of only one man. God help us.
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