HHS carries out mass firings across health agencies after Supreme Court decision

Yahoo

15-07-2025

Thousands of employees across US federal health agencies received an email Monday afternoon telling them they were out of a job as of the close of business.
The firings were originally communicated April 1 for most of the included employees, but they'd been delayed as a legal battle played out. That culminated in a US Supreme Court decision July 8 that, the US Department of Health and Human Services said in the email, means the agency 'is now permitted to move forward with a portion of its [reduction in force].'
'You are hereby notified that you are officially separated from HHS at the close of business on July 14, 2025,' read Monday's notice to dismissed HHS employees, according to copies obtained by CNN. 'Thank you for your service to the American people.'
'HHS previously announced our plans to transform this department to Make America Healthy Again and we intend to do just that,' HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in an email to CNN after the Supreme Court's ruling last week.
In a reorganization announced March 27, HHS eliminated 10,000 employees across agencies including the US Food and Drug Administration, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US National Institutes of Health; some have since gotten their jobs back, but the number losing employment Monday is in the thousands, a spokesperson for the agency confirmed.
Some of those 10,000, though, are protected at least temporarily under a different court case, New York v. Kennedy, and are not being separated immediately, the spokesperson said. That includes employees at six units of the CDC — the National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention; the National Center for Environmental Health; the Division of Reproductive Health; the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health; the Office on Smoking and Health; and the National Center for Birth Defects and Development Disabilities — the Center for Tobacco Products at the FDA; the Office of Head Start; and the Division of Data and Technical Analysis under the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation.
'All employees previously notified on April 1 have been separated, except for those' to whom the temporary protection in New York v. Kennedy applies, the HHS spokesperson said.
In that case, Judge Melissa DuBose of US District Court in Rhode Island granted a preliminary injunction request this month from a coalition of 19 states and the District of Columbia to halt the March 27 reorganization plan.
Last week, the administration asked DuBose to narrow her ruling to the divisions cited by the HHS spokesperson, but the judge has yet to rule on that request.
The layoffs will probably be challenged in court given that many HHS workers are still protected by DuBose's order, but the agency could argue that the Supreme Court ruling allows it to reduce staff, said Michael Fallings, a managing partner at Tully Rinckey who specializes in federal employment law.
Also Monday, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to proceed with mass layoffs at another agency – the Department of Education – for now. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by a teachers union, school districts, states and education groups.
Within two hours of that decision, the department sent notices to employees indicating that it's immediately resuming its plans and that the workers would be let go on August 1.
'They seem to be emboldened by the recent Supreme Court decisions that have been green-lighting the Trump administration's actions that other courts have stayed,' said Andrew Twinamatsiko, a director of the Center for Health Policy and the Law at the O'Neill Institute at Georgetown University, of HHS proceeding with the layoffs.
In last week's Supreme Court ruling, the justices allowed federal agencies to proceed with their reduction-in-force, or RIF, plans, putting on hold a lower court order that had temporarily blocked President Donald Trump from taking those steps without approval from Congress.
But the justices noted that 'we express no view on the legality of any Agency RIF and Reorganization Plan,' leaving open the possibility that it could rule against a specific agency's layoff plan in the future if the reductions appeared to make it impossible for the department to carry out its obligation under the law.
Filed by a coalition of more than a dozen unions, nonprofits and local governments, that case stemmed from an executive order Trump signed in mid-February that kicked off the process of significantly reducing the size of federal agencies.
CNN's John Fritze, Devan Cole and Sunlen Serfaty contributed to this report.