On Monday, President Joe Biden’s top science adviser, Eric Lander, resigned after reports that he routinely bullied and mistreated his subordinates.
Despite Biden’s promise early in his presidency that he would fire anyone “on the spot” who was caught “treat[ing] another colleague with disrespect” or “talk[ing] down to someone,” the White House initially insisted that Lander would “remain in his post while corrective actions and remediations were applied to assure a better workplace environment at the Office of Science and Technology Policy,” according to Politico.
However, later on Monday, Lander announced his resignation in a letter to the president.
“It has been a great honor to serve as your Science Advisor and to work with the extraordinarily talented career and non-career colleagues at the Office of Science and Technology Policy,” Lander wrote. “I am writing to submit my resignation, to be effective no later than February 18 in order to permit an orderly transfer.”
“I am devastated that I caused hurt to past and present colleagues by the way in which I have spoken to them,” he added.
Early Monday morning, Politico released a report revealing that a two-month internal White House investigation found that Lander “bullied and demeaned his subordinates and violated the White House’s workplace policy.”
According to Politico, “Christian Peele, the White House’s deputy director of management and administration for personnel, said that the investigation also concluded that there was ‘credible evidence of disrespectful interactions with staff by Dr. Lander and OSTP leadership,’ according to the roughly 20-minute briefing, which included a representative of the White House Counsel’s office.”
Peele also said that there was “credible evidence” that Lander had spoken, “harshly and disrespectfully to colleagues in front of other colleagues.”
“The investigation found credible evidence of instances of multiple women having complained to other staff about negative interactions with Dr. Lander, where he spoke to them in a demeaning or abrasive way in front of other staff,” Peele added.