Layoff notices began arriving early Tuesday for thousands of employees of the sprawling Department of Health and Human Services and its subsidiary agencies, with as many 10,000 workers potentially expected to be hit by the cuts, including some of the country’s top health officials.
The range of job losses across institutes and offices reflected the breadth of what HHS does and the role it plays in the U.S., in both the obvious ways and less appreciated ones. The cuts and reorganizations affected people who help approve new medicines, track emerging pathogens, and uncover the secrets held in our DNA. But they also reached those developing safer tobacco policies, trying to reduce injuries, and protecting people who rely on Medicare and Medicaid — as well as the staff who made the agencies operate day to day and aimed to communicate health updates, new recommendations, and policy shifts to the public.
For those staff, Tuesday morning extended the uncertainty they had been dealing with since the Trump administration took office with plans to drastically cut the federal workforce. Emails went out to affected employees around 5 a.m., but some who hadn’t seen the messages showed up to work only to be turned away, realizing they had lost their jobs because their badges weren’t working, multiple sources told STAT. At the Food and Drug Administration’s campus in Silver Spring, Md., security guards instructed fired employees to wait in a line so they could later clean out their offices.
Adding to the anxiety was the fact that the dismissals included people who work in human resources and those who process time sheets. Employees were left wondering how they would get paid or whether their early retirements could get processed.
In some cases, it appeared that leaders of affected programs and divisions were being kept in the dark about the impending layoffs. At one of the affected agencies on Tuesday, some staff received emails from a supervisor asking them to notify their higher-ups if they received a RIF notice — the government’s term for reduction in force.
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“I regret to inform you that you have been affected by a reduction in force (RIF) action,” an email to selected employees said. It went on to tell the recipients that they were placed on immediate administrative leave, offering no details of the length of that leave. The email also stated that their firing was not a reflection of their work.
The email was signed by Tom Nagy, deputy assistant secretary for human resources at HHS. “Leadership at HHS appreciates your service,” it said in closing. Emails to other workers cited performance as the reason for their layoffs, and in some cases included information that recipients said wasn’t accurate..
One employee of an HHS agency who did not receive a RIF notice remarked: “Terminations hitting … on April fools day. So cruel.”
At the FDA, news spread that Peter Stein, director of the Office of New Drugs, and Brian King, director of the tobacco center, were both leaving the agency. Stein told office directors in an email that he had been offered a smaller role in patient affairs but decided to quit instead, one agency source said. His office oversees investigational drug studies and the approval process for new drugs.
Employees in the offices of management at FDA’s drug and device centers also were affected, sources told STAT, as well as those in the FDA’s Office of Media Affairs.
Cuts hit particularly hard at the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, including key scientists who were overseeing projects on avian influenza, antimicrobial resistance, and chemical contaminants in the food supply. “It’s going to be pretty hard to see how the center functions after this,” said one former employee.
One division that was not touched as of Tuesday morning was the FDA’s Oncology Center of Excellence, sources said.
At the National Institutes of Health, several directors were let go, while others, including Jeanne Marrazzo, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, were put on administrative leave. Marrazzo, a longtime infectious disease specialist and the successor to Anthony Fauci, was told not to report to work Tuesday and offered a reassignment to the Indian Health Service, according to a source familiar with the matter.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced last week that he would be cutting 25% of the staff of his department with a goal of saving $1.8 billion. “We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions,” Kennedy said in a video message posted to X.
As of last week, it was estimated that the FDA would take the biggest cut, losing roughly 3,500 employees, or about 19% its workforce, followed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which was expected to lose 2,400 employees, or about 18% of its staff. The NIH was projected to lose about 1,200 employees, or about 6% of its workers.
HHS has argued that the reductions, in addition to saving money, would “streamline” the department by reducing redundancies across agencies and centralizing administrative positions and functions. It also said that the reorganization would enable the department to address chronic diseases — a Kennedy priority — while maintaining other essential programs.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the chair of the Senate’s health committee, asked Kennedy to testify about the reorganization plans before his panel on April 10. He called it a chance for Kennedy to “set the record straight” and lay out his goals and plans.
Tuesday’s firings came as health agencies were already grappling with the departures — whether people voluntarily leaving or being pushed out — of longtime leaders of certain divisions. At the NIH, for example, Eric Green, the veteran director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, abruptly left his role last month. And at the FDA, Peter Marks, the agency’s top regulator overseeing vaccines and cell and gene therapies, was forced out last week. His departure came as Kennedy has undermined the importance of vaccination generally and in particular in response to an ongoing measles outbreak.
On Tuesday, Julie Tierney, the deputy director at the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, who worked for Marks, was also let go, sources confirmed.
In a post on LinkedIn Tuesday in response to the latest job cuts, Robert Califf, who served two stints as FDA commissioner, said the agency “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.”
“I believe that history will see this a huge mistake,” he continued. “I will be glad if I’m proven wrong, but even then there is no good reason to treat people this way. It will be interesting to hear from the new leadership how they plan to put ‘Humpty Dumpty’ back together again.”
Scott Gottlieb, who led the FDA during the first Trump administration, added his own critique. In a post on X, he noted that Europeans often used to have earlier access to new medicines that Americans had to wait for, but that 25 years of policymaking and investment had “built the FDA into the most efficient, forward-leaning drug regulatory agency in the world — and established the U.S. as the global center of biopharmaceutical innovation.”
“Today, the cumulative barrage on that drug-discovery enterprise, threatens to swiftly bring back those frustrating delays for American consumers, particularly affecting rare diseases and areas of significant unmet medical need,” he wrote.
At the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Trump administration eliminated several divisions. One of them was CMS’ Office of Equal Opportunity and Civil Rights. In the layoff notices, the administration told affected employees to refer questions to Anita Pinder, the office’s former director, who died in November, according to two sources.
CMS also got rid of five divisions within its Office of Acquisition and Grants Management, which helps the agency contract Medicare and Medicaid operations to outside parties. Those include the Division of Medicare Program Contracts, Division of Policy Oversight, Division of Support Contracts, Division of Quality Contracts Support, and the Division of Business Operations and Communications.
Reports emerging from the CDC suggested that agency scientists working in the areas of injury prevention, birth defects, reproductive health, substance use, and environmental health were reduced. A source told STAT that some senior leadership of affected programs at the CDC were notified they were being reassigned to the IHS. Among them was Dylan George, director for the Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, set up during the Covid-19 pandemic to modernize CDC’s disease forecasting capacity.
Accepting a new IHS position would often require moving to a different part of the country.
As one observer noted, it looked like the people deciding on which sections of the CDC to cut looked at the organizational chart and slashed everything that did not look like it was related to infectious diseases. Returning the CDC to its original mission of controlling infectious diseases was one of the reasons given for the expected deep cuts to the agency.
At the NIH, the human resources, policy, and communications offices were hit hardest, according to five people familiar. Whole offices at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the genome research institute were eliminated Tuesday morning, with some offers to employees to transfer to the IHS.
Diana Bianchi, the director of the child health institute, was placed on leave. Meanwhile, Vence Bonham, who was leading the genome research institute following Green’s departure on an acting basis, had been put on leave Monday, STAT reported.
Jay Bhattacharya, the new director of the NIH, who officially took the reins on Tuesday, noted in an email to NIH staff outlining his priorities that the agency had “experienced a significant reduction in its workforce,” which he said “will have a profound impact on key NIH administrative functions, including communications, legislative affairs, procurement, and human resources, and will require an entirely new approach to how we carry them out.”
“I will do my best to lead NIH through these reforms, implement new policies humanely, and endeavor to earn your trust,” Bhattacharya wrote in the message, which was obtained by STAT.
Meanwhile, on social media, HHS posted photos of Kennedy with Bhattacharya and Marty Makary, the new FDA commissioner. “We look forward to restoring trust, transparency, and excellence in public health,” the post said.
Matthew Herper, Bob Herman, Jason Mast, Usha Lee McFarling, Brittany Trang, and Anil Oza contributed reporting.
