"The adviser, Eric S. Lander, had
apologized for his workplace conduct. The president had pledged to immediately
fire any official who acted that way toward colleagues.
WASHINGTON — Eric S. Lander, the president’s top science adviser,
resigned Monday evening after acknowledging that he had demeaned and
disrespected his colleagues, behavior that prompted immediate questions about
how he could keep his job given President Biden’s promise to fire any aide who
disrespected others.
“The president accepted Dr. Eric
Lander’s resignation letter this evening with gratitude” for his work, Jen
Psaki, the White House press secretary, said in a statement. “He knows that Dr.
Lander will continue to make important contributions to the scientific
community in the years ahead.”
Dr. Lander, a cabinet-level
official, apologized in an email to his staff after an internal investigation
found that he had violated an administration policy that outlines rules for
respectful workplace conduct. In his resignation letter to the president, he
again expressed regret for having been disrespectful.
“I am devastated that I caused hurt
to past and present colleagues by the way in which I have spoken to them,” Dr.
Lander wrote in his resignation letter. “I have sought to push myself and my
colleagues to reach our shared goals — including at times challenging and
criticizing. But it is clear that things I said, and the way I said them,
crossed the line at times into being disrespectful and demeaning, to both men
and women.”
Mr. Biden, on his first day in
office, said he would immediately terminate anyone who was caught showing
disrespect to another colleague.
“If you’re ever working with me and
I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I
promise you I will fire you on the spot,” Mr. Biden told a group of appointees
on Inauguration Day. “Everybody, everybody is entitled to be treated with
decency and dignity. That’s been missing in a big way for the last four years.”
Since then, the White House has
faced questions on how Mr. Biden’s edict has been applied across the
administration.
In February, T.J. Ducklo, a former deputy White
House press secretary, resigned after he had used abusive and sexist language
with a female reporter. (The resignation only came after an outcry over his
initial punishment, which was suspension without pay for a week.)
The case of Dr. Lander was revealed earlier by Politico.
Rachel Wallace, who served as Dr. Lander’s former general counsel, brought a
complaint against him and other leaders in the Office of Science and Technology
Policy.
“Lander’s apology did not come close
to addressing the full extent of his egregious behavior,” she said in an
interview with Politico, choosing to reveal her identity after she read the
letter he sent to employees.
“Numerous women have been left in
tears, traumatized, and feeling vulnerable and isolated,” Ms. Wallace said.
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The investigation into Ms. Wallace’s
complaint found that he had engaged in “bullying” behavior toward her.
Investigators also uncovered “credible evidence of instances of multiple women
having complained to other staff about negative interactions with Dr. Lander,”
according to the Politico report.
An administration official, who was
not authorized to speak publicly about the process, said that the investigation
did not find credible evidence of gender-based discrimination and that Ms.
Wallace’s reassignment was deemed appropriate. Ms. Wallace is now deputy
counsel and chief operating officer at the office.
The White House initially stood by
Dr. Lander. Ms. Psaki fielded questions from reporters on the matter earlier on
Monday, including several who questioned how the president could operate with a
zero-tolerance policy on workplace harassment if Dr. Lander remained employed.
But pressure quickly mounted after
Ms. Wallace publicly said that his apology was not sufficient, and that his
behavior had been widespread, abusive and focused on women.
“Our objective and the president’s
objective is to prevent this behavior from ever happening again,” Ms. Psaki
said.
Ms. Psaki referred repeatedly to the
administration’s “Safe and Respectful Workplace Policy across the Executive
Office of the President,” which she said was completed early in Mr. Biden’s
tenure.
The document, sent by Dana Remus,
the White House counsel, to employees in May, states that “discrimination;
harassment, including sexual harassment; bullying; and retaliation violate the
respect owed to every employees in the White House, and such conduct will not
be tolerated,” according to a copy obtained by The New York Times.
Bullying is defined in the policy as “repeated behavior that
a reasonable individual would find disrespectful, intimidating, hostile,
degrading, humiliating or offensive.”
Ms. Psaki said Dr. Lander’s
background had been extensively vetted during his Senate confirmation process,
for which she noted he had received bipartisan support. It was not a smooth
road. During the process, Dr. Lander was questioned by Republicans and
Democrats about his past contact with Jeffrey E. Epstein, the former financier
and convicted sex offender. He also apologized for
“understating” the contributions of two female scientists to the discovery of
gene-editing technology.
At the time, Senator Tammy
Duckworth, Democrat of Illinois, gave him some advice: She said she hoped the
doctor would “use this hearing as an opportunity to explain how you have
learned from your past mistakes.”
On Monday, members of the House
Committee on Science, Space and Technology requested that the
White House provide them with a copy of the administration’s internal
investigation report.
Dr. Lander, a mathematician by
training who entered genetics, is best known as one of the leaders
of the Human Genome Project and the former head of the Broad Institute of
M.I.T. and Harvard. He was the first person in his role to be elevated to the
presidential cabinet, and was in charge of the president’s cancer “moonshot” initiative,
which aims to reduce the death rate from cancer by at least 50 percent over 25
years. In recent weeks, he had delivered briefings on the subject to the
president and first lady, whose eldest son, Beau, died of brain cancer in
2015.
But by the time he was appointed to
be Mr. Biden’s science adviser, he was well known within the scientific
community for offending women. Last January, the organization 500 Women
Scientists published an editorial in Scientific American that pleaded with Mr. Biden
to consider naming someone else — preferably a woman — to the position.
“While we can celebrate the
Biden-Harris administration’s commitment to science, we must recognize that
Lander has a reputation among some scientists for being controversial,
and colleagues have criticized him for his ‘ego without end,’”
the group wrote. They also pointed out that he had in the past toasted James
Watson, a molecular biologist who, the authors of the letter wrote, had a “long
history of racist and sexist comments.”"
