HHS Employees Start Receiving Layoff Emails as Massive Cuts Begin

Layoffs are formally beginning in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), after leadership announced that 10,000 employees were going to be cut.

Employees were left twisting in the wind for several days, between the layoff announcement and official notices. According to the Associated Press, employees began receiving dismissal notices on Tuesday. 

The layoff notices are said to be spread across the agency. 

“It’s a bloodbath,” one Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employee told CNN. 

The layoffs are expected to shrink the HHS workforce to 62,000 from 82,000. About half of that will be from these layoffs, the other half through retirements and deferred resignations.

In a fact sheet, HHS detailed some of the cuts:

• 3,500 jobs at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

• 2,400 jobs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

• 1,200 at the National Institutes of Health (NIH)

The Trump Administration says it’s reorganizing HHS from 28 divisions to 15, cutting five regional offices, and centralizing HR, IT, procurement, external affairs, and policy. The goal is to streamline the agency and make it “more responsive and efficient” and deliver on the administration’s goal of “making America healthy again.” 

“We aren't just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said. “This Department will do more – a lot more – at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”

White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought called the layoffs “fantastic.” 

“A Catastrophe”

Opponents say the reductions in force will not make America healthy, but will instead make America less healthy, as critical employees in research, food safety and inspection, drug inspection, mental health, and elsewhere get pink slips.  

“It is a catastrophe for the health care of every American,” said Senator Ed Markey (D-MA). 

“These staff cuts endanger public health and food safety,” said Brian Ronholm, director of food policy at Consumer Reports. “They raise serious concerns that the administration’s pledge to make Americans healthy again could become nothing more than an empty promise.”