People wait outside the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building at 90 7th St. in San Francisco, Tuesday. Several federal workers were laid off from this jobs Tuesday, some receiving emails at 2 a.m.
Laura Waxmann / The Chronicle
Even after weeks of bracing for the chopping block, U.S. Health and Human Services Department employees in San Francisco said that they were in shock and disbelief over layoffs that impacted more than 300 people within their towering federal complex in Mid-Market, and believe the cuts will have far-reaching implications outside of the city.
“We all were shell-shocked,” said Pete Weldy, the regional manager for a division of the department known as the Administration for Children and Families, or ACF, who was among the 55 members of his 65-person team that woke up on Tuesday morning to termination notices.
Laura Waxmann / The Chronicle
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The team wasn’t the only one given notice.
“And, it’s affecting not only ACF, but the Health Resources and Services Administration. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services has no staff left,” Weldy said. Meanwhile, he said their Program Support Center “didn’t get any notice at all.”
The layoffs come months after federal workers across the country were ordered to return to physical offices full-time. In San Francisco, where remote work has severely impacted the economic health of neighborhoods like Mid-Market, some city stakeholders welcomed the mandate.
But now, “300-plus people will no longer be coming to Mid-Market, patronizing local businesses,” Weldy said.
Until now, the HHS regional office — located in the Speaker Nancy Pelosi Federal Building at 90 7th St. — had roughly $12 billion in funding flowing through it to support a range of programs including child care and welfare, refugee resettlement, human trafficking prevention and disease prevention. With 318 staff members who managed Medicare, Medicaid, health services for Native Americans and HIV/AIDS programs for Arizona, California, Hawaii, Nevada, six American territories and nearly 160 federally-recognized tribes, the department was the largest tenant inside of the federal building, according to Weldy.
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“We’re the (agency) that’s supposed to serve the most vulnerable kids and families in the country, and there are billions of dollars that will now go unmonitored and unaccounted for,” he said about his own division, the ACF.
“It’s just really heartbreaking and scary,” said a terminated HHS employee who left the federal building mid-morning clutching her laptop.
“There’s so many things that we do — we work with states, tribes and territories to ensure health and safety in child care programs,” she said, before breaking off the interview as her voice filled with tears.
Another former employee who left the building shortly afterward said that the HHS regional office in San Francisco served as the “bridge” between the U.S. government and its “partners,” including those in the Pacific Islands.
“A lot of my work had to do with health emergencies. I think this sets the country up for a lot of risk, in terms of outbreaks that could become potential pandemics,” the woman, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution, said. Historically, federal employees have not been authorized to speak publicly or “promote ourselves,” the woman said, adding that even though she was fired, the fear to speak out is even greater now.
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“It’s very clear that we have been under attack,” she said.
The largest number of employees in the San Francisco office work for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, a unit that oversees the licenses and certifications of providers that accept government healthcare funding. Employees assist hospitals that are in danger of losing their Medicare certifications, a role that’s particularly important in areas where medical care is scarce.
“I’m more worried about Arizona and Nevada and the rural areas of California, where the feds really are the ones that fill in for that assistance where the states can’t reach,” said one employee.
Adding “insult to injury,” according to Weldy, the ACF manager, President Donald Trump during his first term nearly a decade ago launched an effort to “right-size” the HHS regional offices. In San Francisco, the plan was meant to shrink the department’s two suites inside of the Seventh Street federal building down to one.
The $3.5 million project was still not fully completed when hundreds of the department’s employees learned Tuesday that its offices in the federal building had been shuttered permanently. Like the programs that the department runs out of the more than 600,000-square-foot federal building, the future of the office consolidation project is now up in the air.
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“That is an insane waste of money — this is not about efficiency,” Weldy said. “The most wasteful thing to do is to move out of a building where you’ve already obligated millions of dollars on a project that may still get completed, but there won’t be any human beings to occupy that new office.”
The Trump Administration’s announcements left open crucial questions about the fate of the department, leaving employees to scramble for information through unofficial channels like the news media and Signal messaging chains with coworkers.
It’s still unclear whether any of the laid-off employees will be offered opportunities to transfer to another office, or even how they were supposed to collect their belongings in a building where they ostensibly no longer had access.
“I don’t think right now there’s any path for us to be reassigned because I think the intent of this is to downsize and rip the government apart as fast as possible,” one worker said in a phone interview.
Laid-off HHS workers confirmed that they were placed on administrative leave through June 2. Some employees have begun discussing possible legal action, while others on Tuesday said they were still processing the news.
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“We know that the HHS Office will be closing, but we don’t know if there’s going to be a court injunction or anything like that,” one employee said. “Because we’re on admin leave; it’s not a done deal.”
“It’s been awful for weeks — this threat, this lingering cruelty of, ‘You’re going to be let go today,’” said Steven Wiener, a terminated program specialist for ACF. “It just so happens that I work in San Francisco, and so I was let go — it’s just a completely arbitrary decision. My computer was turned off. I didn’t get to sign what I was supposed to sign. It’s just total chaos and such a disservice to the American people.”
Their notices of dismissal arrived just after 2 a.m., informing hundreds of employees that access to their Seventh Street offices would be immediately disabled. Shortly after opening the missive, their work computers and email accounts stopped functioning as well.
“All of the sudden, at like 10 a.m.-ish, I wasn’t able to send or receive emails; I couldn’t open any documents,” said one San Francisco-based HHS employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It says ‘more information needed,’ and these error messages just keep popping up.”
The layoffs came amid news that the country’s 10 regional HHS offices would be reduced to five, and that San Francisco’s branch was among those that would be shuttered.
San Francisco staffers are among the nearly one-eighth of the massive, 82,000-employee department to be cut. Another one-eighth of the staff took early retirement and voluntary separation offers — meaning the agency will lose a quarter of its overall staff.
“This shortsighted office closure would lead to critical service slowdowns for San Franciscans to get the resources they need and detrimental impacts to our public health response capabilities — all in the name of so-called ‘government efficiency,’” Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi said in a statement confirming the move.
Reach Laura Waxmann: [email protected], X: @laura_waxee; Reach Megan Cassidy: [email protected]
