People demonstrate outside the main campus of the Centers For Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia on April 1, 2025. Elijah Nouvelage / Getty Images
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Thousands of United States health workers were laid off on Tuesday as part of the Trump administration’s massive purge of federal employees, including top scientists and senior leaders in charge of regulating food and drugs, researching treatments and cures and protecting Americans from disease.
Termination emails were sent out to employees of the United States Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration and several smaller agencies, reported NPR.
“Today, two billionaires are making good on their vow to take a wrecking ball to the Department of Health and Human Services and put Americans’ health and wellbeing at serious risk,” said Democratic Senator from Washington State Patty Murray, who is former chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions, in a press release. “These firings make a lot of sense if you believe measles spreading like wildfire is good – or think we should be slashing cancer research. While Republicans work to pass more tax breaks for billionaires, Trump, Musk, and RFK Jr. are ripping essential health services away from the American people and decimating our country’s ability to prevent outbreaks and keep families safe.”
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HHS announced last week that it planned to fire 10,000 people, NPR reported. The forced layoffs are in addition to the roughly 10,000 employees who have already left or whose jobs have been terminated.
“It’s in Project 2025,” said one HHS supervisor, an employee of 20 years, as she waited in a line to find out if she would lose her job, reported The Guardian. “Basically since February they’ve been telling us we might be let go.”
“We’re being led through a security line like you would if you were at TSA,” the supervisor said. “We have to take off our shoes, take out our laptops, and they have to check our badge to make sure we can swipe it, and then check our names against a list.”
Employees of the Department of Health and Human Services stand in line to enter the Mary E. Switzer Memorial Building in Washington, DC on April 2, 2025. Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images
The Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice (DEHSP), part of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health, has “been slated to be eliminated in its entirety,” an internal email from Director Ari Bernstein said, as Politico’s E&E News reported.
Former officials and outside experts described the firings and loss of expertise at the agencies as a “bloodletting,” reported The New York Times.
The cuts are part of a wider plan by HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., who announced last week that he intended to reduce the number of employees at HHS from 82,000 to 62,000. The plan includes a number of agencies being collapsed into the new Administration for a Healthy America.
The intention of the restructuring is to bring the functions and communications of the agency under the direct supervision of Kennedy, who has said he will “make America healthy again.”
“These cuts to agency experts and programs leave our country less safe, less prepared and without the necessary talent and resources to respond to health threats,” said Mandy Cohen, head of the CDC during the Biden administration, in a text message, as The New York Times reported.
Kennedy is also getting rid of departments like the Administration for Community Living, which supports programs to help people with disabilities and older Americans live independently.
“Today was simply a tragedy,” said Michael T. Osterholm, director of University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, who has been a presidential advisor. “There is so much intellectual capital that literally got swept under the rug today in this country, and we are going to pay a price for this for years to come.”
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