Tuesday marked the beginning of the end for the federal government’s public health authorities, with an early morning wave of reduction-in-force emails placing thousands of employees on notice for imminent termination.
Whole sub-agencies at the Department of Health and Human Services are gone, according to furious and despondent current and former employees who flooded Reddit boards with firsthand accounts. The cuts gutted or wholly shut down regional offices, including the agency’s IT infrastructure and even an agency that mobilizes after natural disasters, such as hurricanes: the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response.
The website for that agency was already down by noon.
“I’m overwhelmed with messages about the firings. The FDA as we’ve known it is finished,” wrote former Food and Drug Administration commissioner Dr Robert Carliff on LinkedIn.
“I believe that history will see this [as] a huge mistake,” he said. “ 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.”
Lines appeared outside of HHS offices in Washington, D.C. as well as at regional offices around the country. Six regional offices were already confirmed to be closing in March. Many employees appeared to be learning of their terminations in real time as they arrived for work.
On Tuesday, it appeared that hundreds of employees had missed the early-morning emails announcing the terminations and were ushered in to see if their security badges still granted access.
Cuts appeared to hit administrative divisions at the agencies, including communications staff, particularly hard.
Robert F Kennedy Jr., the nation’s Health secretary, hadn’t issued a public statement about the reduction-in-force emails by early Tuesday afternoon. The secretary was in Washington, however, celebrating the swearing-in of Dr. Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes of Health and Dr. Marty Makary as head of the FDA.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee said that members had staff outside various HHS offices around the District of Columbia passing out “whistleblower resources” to fired employees.
Congressional Republicans, meanwhile, seemed caught on the back foot by the news once again.
“I’m trying to understand it,” Senator Bill Cassidy, chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, told CNN.
“They say that they are consolidating duplicative agencies,” the senator added. He didn’t take a position on supporting the cuts, which number around 10,000 HHS employees in total.
Cory Booker, a Democratic senator from New Jersey, was still speaking as part of a marathon address on the Senate floor he began Monday evening denouncing Republican threats to cut Medicaid and the effects of the Department of Government Efficency’s campaign to reduce the size of the federal government. With a few assists from other Democrats, the senator held the floor through noon Tuesday, more than 18 hours — the longest in Senate history.
Booker’s faux filibuster, which didn’t block any legislation, followed a decision by a number of the senator’s Democratic colleagues to break a Democratic filibuster on a funding bill in March.
With many employees themselves unsure of the scope of cuts to the nation’s public health authority and some likely to challenge their terminations in court, it’s not yet set in stone what the final toll of Tuesday’s reduction will be.
But it’s clear that Elon Musk’s DOGE effort is continuing to move at a breakneck pace across the federal government, undeterred by ongoing attempts to mitigate its work.
Experts warn that rebuilding will take much more time.
“At some point in the future, a Democratic President and Secretary of HHS will probably try to rebuild the department following the major staffing cuts happening now. It won’t be easy, and will likely require Congress,” wrote Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF (formerly the Kaiser Family Foundation).
“The general public likely won’t feel the results of these HHS layoffs immediately,” Levitt added. “But eventually, these layoffs will affect the health information available to people, access to care and prevention, and oversight of health and social services.”
