Senior leaders across the Department of Health and Human Services were put on leave and countless other employees lost their jobs Tuesday as the Trump administration began a sweeping purge of the agencies that oversee government health programs.
Top officials at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration were put on administrative leave or offered reassignment to the Indian Health Service. Other employees began receiving layoff notices or learned they had lost their jobs when their entry badges no longer worked Tuesday morning.
At one HHS office in Rockville, Maryland, long lines grew as workers were screened to determine whether they were still employed.
“When you get here, it is horrible,” one FDA employee wrote, according to messages reviewed by The Washington Post.
At the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, some employees who were laid off were told to contact Anita Pinder, former director of the Office of Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights, with discrimination complaints. Pinder died last year.
A sense of havoc descended on agencies that oversee food and drug safety, manage the nation’s response to infectious-disease threats and drive biomedical research. The broad outlines of an unprecedented downsizing of the federal health workforce were announced last week — a staff reduction from 82,000 to 62,000 that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said will save $1.8 billion annually — but the specifics were unclear until Tuesday.
In a late afternoon post on X, Kennedy wrote that “This overhaul is about realigning HHS with its core mission: to stop the chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again. It’s a win-win for taxpayers, and for every American we serve.”
The number of people who lost their jobs was difficult to ascertain, because many of the staff who would know were dismissed.
HHS last week projected it would lay off about 10,000 people in addition to the 10,000 who took buyouts or retirement offers. On Tuesday, it became clear that move encompasses a broad swath of expertise: biomedical scientists, staff who respond to freedom of information requests and researchers who work to improve patient safety.
What many had not anticipated was that senior leaders also would be removed through the administrative leave process or by proposed transfers. Some received letters that offered reassignment to agencies in remote locations such as Alaska or Billings, Montana.
At the National Institutes of Health, a nearly $48 billion biomedical research agency, at least five top leaders were put on leave. Among those offered reassignment were the infectious-disease institute director Jeanne Marrazzo, according to emails obtained by The Post and multiple people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Marrazzo had succeeded Anthony S. Fauci as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which helped lead the nation’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and later became a target of Republicans. An internal email showed that two other leaders there, H. Clifford Lane and Emily Erbelding, also lost their jobs, and the agency had no advance notice of who had been targeted for layoffs through the reduction in force, or RIF.
“We ask for your help in notifying us if you have staff affected so that we can get a full picture of the RIFs. These are sad times and sadly, they are not yet over,” wrote Steven M. Holland, director of the division of intramural research at NIAID. NIH will see 1,200 layoffs under the plan Kennedy announced Thursday.
Erbelding, director of the Division of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases, said she received an email late Monday night putting her on leave, with a proposal to work at the Indian Health Service in one of several remote areas.
“It’s a lot of leadership out the door, really suddenly and without even the opportunity to plan for some succession,” Erbelding said.
At the CDC, senior leaders who oversee global health, infectious diseases, chronic disease, HIV, sexually transmitted disease, tuberculosis, outbreak forecasting and information technology were among officials notified that they would be reassigned to the Indian Health Service, according to one leader who was reassigned and other current and former agency employees.
“CDC clobbered,” the official said. “The agency will not be able to function. Let’s be honest.”
At the FDA, Peter Stein, head of the agency’s Office of New Drugs, was removed from his position and offered a post in patient affairs, which he declined, Stein wrote in an email obtained by The Post.
Brian King, head of the FDA’s tobacco center, sent an email to staff Tuesday morning, writing: “It is with a heavy heart and profound disappointment that I share I have been placed on administrative leave.”
In a statement, Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) said the news coverage on HHS was “being set by anonymous sources, and opponents are setting the perceptions.” He said Kennedy had committed to coming before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee on a quarterly basis and invited him to testify next week. “This will be a good opportunity for him to set the record straight and speak to the goals, structure and benefits of the proposed reorganization,” Cassidy said.
Democratic lawmakers questioned Monday whether Kennedy’s plan to reorganize HHS could violate federal law.
“Congress has an obligation to assess how changes the department is haphazardly implementing will impact our constituents and the American public,” Sens. Patty Murray (D-Washington) and Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisconsin) and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) wrote in the letter shared with The Post. They added that “this reorganization clearly violates the law.”
The job cuts came just days after Kennedy vowed to remake health agencies to focus on “safe, wholesome food, clean water and the elimination of environmental toxins.”
Kennedy said Thursday in a video address that the agency would “do more with less. No American is going to be left behind.”
Tuesday’s layoffs continue weeks of tumult at U.S. health agencies, where large numbers of federal grants have been cut and hundreds of research projects paused or slated for cancellation.
Del Bigtree, former communications director for Kennedy’s presidential run and CEO of the MAHA Action advocacy group, said Kennedy is putting the health of Americans over the security of some people’s government jobs.
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is not going to get rid of people that are going to get the job done for the American people,” Bigtree said. “So if these people are losing their position, there’s a reason for it.”
Some FDA staff discovered they were part of the sweeping reduction in force when they arrived at the agency’s campus in White Oak, Maryland, on Tuesday morning and their badges would no longer let them into the building, according to two FDA staffers, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
In the FDA’s veterinary medicine center, at least a half-dozen senior leaders, including veterinarians, were laid off. That included personnel working on combating antimicrobial resistance and the bird flu response according to two FDA staffers who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
“This is much broader than expected,” one of the staffers said. “None of the programs or centers had any insight into what was happening.”
The agency charged with overseeing the safety of vaccines and medicines, the majority of the U.S. food supply and tobacco products is slated to lose 3,500 employees, HHS said last week.
“The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed,” Robert Califf, who served as FDA commissioner under Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, wrote on LinkedIn on Tuesday morning.
At the CDC, which sent out nearly 2,400 notices to staff Tuesday, according to two agency officials, entire branches and divisions were eliminated or drastically cut, employees said. That includes several hundred staff at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, or NIOSH, they said.
In the Immunization Services Division, staff members who worked on outreach to undervaccinated communities were among those who received notices, including one person working on the ongoing measles outbreak in Texas and New Mexico, according to two staff members who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
The division’s priorities include improving readiness for outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases.
Kennedy and GOP critics of the CDC have said they want the Atlanta-based public health agency to focus on infectious diseases. One part of the agency that focuses on injury prevention was targeted in the layoffs. Unintentional injuries — suicide, overdose, drownings, car accidents — are the leading cause of death for people under 50, CDC officials have said.
In Texas, Shelley Bain, a 66-year-old employee with the Administration for Children and Families, learned early in the morning that she had been fired from her job as a program specialist. Bain, who lives with her husband and two granddaughters on a farm outside Dallas, now will receive about half the retirement income she had planned on.
She realized, as she sipped her coffee, that she would have to sell her home, with 10 acres of land, where she and her husband had planned to spend their final years.
Bain walked her grandchildren to the bus stop. Before they boarded, she pulled them aside. “Well,” she said, “I just got fired.” The girls frowned. “I’m so sorry, Grandma,” one said. Bain watched the bus pull away, wondering what she would do next.
Emily Davies and Hannah Natanson contributed to this report.
