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AdvaMed, the medical device lobby, pushed back Wednesday on the Trump administration’s weekend firings of Food and Drug Administration employees. AdvaMed CEO Scott Whitaker sent a letter Tuesday to administrators at the Health and Human Services Department urging them to consider the terminations’ potential ramifications on patient health and medical device innovation. In a call with reporters on Wednesday, he noted that many of the roles were funded, at least in part, by fees paid by device makers to help speed the review of their products. Device companies have already noticed delays, he said. (Lawrence, 2/19)

Former Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Administrator Chiquita Brooks-LaSure said she is concerned about the speed at which Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is scrapping federal programs to cut costs. “I think that certainly looking at payments is absolutely OK, but you need to make sure that you’re doing it with knowledge about what these programs do and a real understanding that if you make a tweak here, you can really have a significant effect on people, because this is real money,” Brooks-LaSure said Wednesday at a health care event hosted by Politico. (Irwin, 2/19)

Professors, researchers, and faculty members from several Chicago colleges rallied at the University of Illinois Chicago on Wednesday to protest the Trump administration's planned funding cuts to research grants. ... Faculty members from UIC, the University of Chicago, DePaul University, Northwestern University, and many more gathered at UIC on Wednesday to talk about their schools' groundbreaking research, medical advancements, and workforce training for students. (Feurer, 2/19)

Groups that receive foreign aid are asking a federal judge to find the Trump officials now running the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in contempt of court for not reopening the flow of money to thousands of programs around the globe, as the judge has ordered. In a filing Wednesday afternoon, the plaintiffs said that each day the funding is delayed, millions of people across the world who rely on it suffer. It urged the judge to impose penalties until the U.S. government complies. (Langfitt, 2/19)

Scientists around the country fear that an apparent halt of the Federal Register's publication of meeting schedules for research grant reviews is an attempt to evade a judge's order that was supposed to lift the Trump administration's freeze on federal research funding. Pausing Federal Register notice publication means numerous NIH study sections and advisory councils -- panels of subject experts who evaluate each grant application -- can't meet to make decisions on those proposals. (Clark, 2/19)