Trump HHS Fires 10,000 Federal Health Workers In Single Morning, Selects April 1 To Underscore Administration's Distinctive Comic Sensibility
WASHINGTON. The Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday morning sent layoff notices to approximately 10,000 federal employees across the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, and several smaller agencies, completing in a single coordinated email purge what Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described in a prerecorded video message as a long-overdue restructuring, and what affected career scientists described as the largest single-day reduction of public health expertise in American history.
The firings, conducted on April 1 in what officials confirmed was a deliberate scheduling choice, eliminated entire branches of work overseeing infectious disease surveillance, occupational safety enforcement, drug review, vaccine policy, and minority health, leaving roughly a quarter of the federal health workforce removed when combined with voluntary departures earlier in the year. Workers learned of their dismissals after their badges stopped working at agency entrances, after which many were filmed by colleagues forming long lines outside buildings in Atlanta, Bethesda, and Silver Spring, waiting to be escorted inside to retrieve personal belongings.
"We are returning HHS to the kitchen-table issues of childhood chronic disease, environmental toxins, and food," Kennedy said in the video, declining to address how the elimination of the FDA's tobacco division, the NIOSH coal-miner health surveillance program, the FDA office of generic drugs policy, and the CDC's lead-poisoning prevention branch advanced any of these stated priorities. A senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the timing of the firings on April Fool's Day had been selected to communicate a posture, adding that the administration had no comment for now regarding the offices that had collectively prevented an estimated several hundred thousand premature American deaths over the past forty years.
Among the eliminated programs were the only federal team responsible for monitoring the safety of contact lenses, the FDA office responsible for enforcing manufacturing standards on injectable medications, the CDC division that had coordinated the country's response to two prior pandemics, and the agency staff actively tracking an ongoing H5N1 avian influenza outbreak. Several of the laid-off scientists confirmed they had been on calls with state health officials about the bird flu response at the moment they discovered they were no longer employed. Their replacements, officials said, would be drawn from a pool of contractors to be identified later.
The firings followed a separate March 12 EPA deregulatory blitz, the cancellation of mRNA vaccine grants, a January executive order withdrawing the United States from the World Health Organization, and a sustained public campaign by Kennedy questioning the safety of the measles vaccine, which has saved an estimated 60 million lives globally and which the United States had certified as eliminated from domestic transmission in 2000, a status the country lost during the same week as the layoffs.
At press time, the Department of Health and Human Services had advertised no plan to backfill the lost epidemiological capacity, beyond an instruction that surviving staff do more with less, and a Kennedy-fronted social media campaign urging Americans to combat infectious disease through sunlight, raw milk, and personal responsibility.