After leaving the NIH, Walter Koroshetz worries for its future

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The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) is one of several Department of Health and Human Services agencies that has lost thousands of employees over the last year, and it doesn’t seem like the carousel will stop anytime soon.

Walter Koroshetz is among many NIH leaders who left the agency. He was ousted from his role as director of the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in late 2025 and left the position in January.

He now sits on the board of directors and acts as a senior advisor to the Invisible Wounds Foundation, a Chicago-based nonprofit that focuses on accelerating research, diagnosis, and treatment for military brain injuries, and serves as a senior advisor to private philanthropic group the Dana Foundation.

As NIH researchers continue to lose funding and leaders leave, Koroshetz talked to Healthcare Brew about parting ways with the federal government, his hopes, and his fears for the agency he used to be part of.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Would you say the NIH is experiencing an unprecedented level of turnover?

Oh yeah. No question, this is a crisis.

The people who are left, their workload is doubled. The bureaucracy to get anything done is tripled. I mean, they’re real heroes, the people who are left.

You’ve made it to the other side and found some roles you can connect with. Do you have any advice for other leaders or employees who are parting ways with the NIH or other government organizations?

The leaders who were there, they’re such high quality and had such great experience that I think they’re not going to have trouble finding positions of value. The bigger concern is the younger people.

A lot of those people, they had just moved into town to take the job, they got a rental, put their kids in school, and then were put out without a job.

It happened all around Washington. So there’s a lot of people with a similar skill set in the Washington area now that [are having] a hard time finding jobs. Those are the people that personally were most greatly affected.

What is your biggest concern about these job losses?

That it will be hard to get good people to take jobs at NIH once they open them up. They have all these searches going on, and they really need good people. If they get political appointees at these institute levels, that’s a tragedy because NIH was always nonpolitical. It was always nonpartisan. Although people say differently, there was really no politics [to] what we did. We funded the best science, that was it, and hopefully they continue doing that. But a lot of roadblocks have been put up, unfortunately.

Do you think you’d ever return to government work?

I’d have no qualms about going back if a new administration wanted me back. But on the other hand, I was there 20 years. So for me, it wasn’t personally traumatic. It’s more traumatic for the institute, losing so many people.