I'm an MD/PhD assistant professor in academic medicine in the US. I currently don't have protected time, external/internal funding, or any other resources for research but try to get clinical research projects done despite these challenges.

In my practice group, we have several PhD-level staff who don't do patient care but fulfill other roles. A few years ago, I was looking for research collaborators and approached one of these PhD colleague I'll call Pete, who started at this institution around the same time as me, since it sounded like we had mutual interests and compatible skill sets (me in clinical analysis, him in bioinformatics). Pete and I started meeting regularly to go over projects we hoped to publish together - we outlined a bunch of projects and a rough timeline. I also introduced Pete to other clinical collaborators I'd connected with.

Pete has turned out to be a nightmare to work with. He does minimal work and expects first or senior authorship. He won't contribute to writing, data analysis, or other logistics, despite having what is likely a lot more bandwidth than me. So far, over ~two years, our collaboration has resulted in one meeting abstract in which I did >90% of the work, a nonfunded internal grant application we agreed to write together but I ended up writing entirely by myself (because he was "too busy working on another grant application that's actually important" at the time - my jaw dropped when he said that to me), and a yet-to-be-submitted manuscript where he insisted on being first author despite refusing to contribute more than a figure and some raw data (I'm not planning on moving forward with that one from my end). All of the projects Pete said he'd lead and include me on have never come to fruition (or if they have, I haven't been included).

There's also a large collaboration with a manuscript currently in revision that Pete's on because of me where he somehow finagled himself to be a co-last author (I'm a senior author directly preceding Pete). A large group of us (the first two authors, Pete and the other co-last author, and me) have been working on this manuscript for over a year now, having regular meetings, sending revisions back and forth, etc. We were meeting every few weeks until a few months ago when the meetings dropped off, just as the manuscript was almost ready for submission -- I figured I'd hear back from the team when the manuscript was submitted. I found out today that the manuscript was submitted a while ago and has been returned with revisions, and that the other four members of our group are having meetings about it but somehow forgot to include me. I spoke to the first author and other co-senior author today and they were apologetic and reiterated that they've really enjoyed working with me on this project, but one of them mentioned that Pete was the one who suggested to have further meetings with only the two first authors and two senior authors (basically, everyone except me). Based on my experience with Pete being underhanded and manipulative, I'm sure this wasn't an accident. I have now reinserted myself into that loop and will continue meeting with our core group including Pete for revisions.

At this point, I am of the mind to cut research projects with Pete off completely. The complications are that Pete is still my coworker and that Pete is basically a nepo baby with privileged status in the department. (The background: our current department chair came from another organization around 5 years ago, and this chair subsequently recruited half a dozen former coworkers including Pete to our organization. Pete would not be qualified to hold the job he does if not for this connection.)

Any advice? Has anyone else successfully (or unsuccessfully) navigated a situation like this? If it weren't for the political situation I would tell Pete point-blank our research collaboration is over (I'm already moving on with other projects that don't involve Pete - I can easily outsource his expertise), but my gut is telling me to play the long game and do a gradual fade-out instead.