Major Layoffs Begin at Health Agencies That Track Disease and Regulate Food

New York Times

01-04-2025

Hundreds of federal health workers, including doctors in senior leadership positions, began hearing early Tuesday morning that they are losing their jobs, part of a vast restructuring that will winnow down the agencies charged with regulating food and drugs, protecting Americans from disease and researching new treatments and cures.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced last week that he is shrinking his department from 82,000 to 62,000 employees. Some senior leaders based in the Washington, D.C., area received notices that they were being reassigned to Indian Health Service territories, a tactic to force people out, employees said, because it would entail moving to other parts of the country.
The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Notices began arriving at 5 a.m., workers said, affecting offices responsible for everything from global health to medical devices to communications. Some knew the layoffs were coming; at the department headquarters in Washington, officials responsible for minority health and infectious disease prevention were told Friday that their offices were being eliminated, according to employees.
Others were caught off guard. At the Food and Drug Administration, senior leaders were pushed out and offices focused on food, drug and medical device policy were hit with deep staff reductions amounting to about 3,500 agency staff members. Some workers said that they discovered they were fired when they attempted to scan their badge to get into the building early Tuesday.
The top tobacco regulator, Brian King, was offered a job with a regional office of the Indian Health Service that includes Alaska, according to Mitch Zeller, his predecessor at the division. Other staff who oversee veterinary medicine and coordinate the complex work of reviewing new drug applications that can run for thousands of pages were let go.
Some leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including Kayla Laserson, who led the global health center, received similar notices of reassignment or were placed on administrative leave. At the agency, the reorganization, with cuts totaling 2,400, seemed aimed at narrowing its focus to infectious diseases. Entire departments studying chronic diseases and environmental problems were cut.
Employees laid off at the agency included those studying injuries, asthma, lead poisoning, smoking and radiation damage, as well as those that assess the health effects of extreme heat and wildfires.
But some infectious disease teams were also laid off. A group focused on improving access to vaccines among underserved communities was cut, as was a group of global health researchers who were working on preventing mother to child transmission of H.I.V.
H.I.V. prevention was a big target overall. Jonathan Mermin, director of the center for H.I.V. and sexually transmitted diseases, was placed on administrative leave. The Trump administration had been weighing moving the C.D.C.'s division of H.I.V. prevention to a different agency within the health department. But on Tuesday, teams leading H.I.V. surveillance and research within that division were laid off. It was unclear whether some of those functions would be recreated elsewhere.
At the National Institutes of Health, several directors of institutes were given notices of reassignment to Indian Health Service territories, and were told that they would need to report back on Wednesday on whether they would accept the move.
Among them were Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, who succeeded Dr. Anthony S. Fauci as the director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases and Shannon Zenk, who leads the National Institute of Nursing Research.
Communications offices were hit particularly hard across agencies including N.I.H., C.D.C. and F.D.A. Renate Myles, the communications director at the National Institutes of Health, received a notice of reassignment. Mr. Kennedy, who promised 'radical transparency,' has said he wants to consolidate communications under his purview.
The H.H.S. 'is centralizing communications across the department to ensure a more coordinated and effective response to public health challenges, ultimately benefiting the American taxpayer,' Emily Hilliard, deputy press secretary for the department, said in an email on Friday.