Thousands of HHS employees laid off in major restructuring
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has begun laying off thousands of employees as part of a significant restructuring effort.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has begun laying off thousands of employees as part of a significant restructuring effort.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has begun laying off thousands of employees as part of a significant restructuring effort.
Thousands of federal health employees, including doctors, researchers, and scientists, found themselves without a job as the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) started sending notices as part of a sweeping overhaul of the agency.
Tuesday morning, hundreds of Health and Human Services employees waited outside the agency's D.C. headquarters to see if they were one of 10,000 laid off.
"The revolution begins today," Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said while introducing the new heads of the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health, just hours after approving the layoffs.
The layoffs are part of the health secretary's plan to overhaul the department, which tracks health trends, funds medical research, and monitors food and drug safety.
"The scale of cuts and the kind of cuts we're seeing in the federal workforce at HHS may not affect people's lives immediately, but it will affect people's health and safety in the long run," KFF's executive vice president for health policy Larry Levitt said.
Among the agencies hardest hit, the FDA is losing 3,500 employees, including its tobacco chief and staff responsible for regulating drugs and tobacco products. Thousands of layoffs were also announced at NIH and the Centers for Disease Control.
The plan also consolidates agencies that oversee addiction services and community health centers into a new office under the Administration for a Healthy America.
Today, Democratic attorneys general in 23 states are suing the Trump administration over the rollback of about $12 billion in public health funding as part of their restructuring efforts.
The lawsuit alleges that the "funding provides essential support for a wide range of urgent public health needs such as identifying, tracking, and addressing infectious diseases; ensuring access to immunizations; fortifying emergency preparedness; providing mental health and substance abuse services; and modernizing critical public health infrastructure."
The agency says the funds were for the pandemic.
“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago. HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again,” the agency said in a statement last week.
The layoffs are expected to shrink HHS to 62,000 positions, removing nearly a quarter of the agency's workers through job cuts and resignation offers.