Health agencies lose staff in key areas as Trump firings set in

Old_Joe

Excerpted from a recent NPR report:

Termination letters landed in the mailboxes of hundreds of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the National Institutes of Health over the weekend, as the Trump administration moved ahead with firings announced verbally Friday.

Among staff who were caught up in the first wave of layoffs: PhD-trained scientists tasked with helping local and state officials respond to outbreaks; employees that ensure medical devices for patients with cancer and diabetes are safe; and a public health worker stationed at an international airport who enforces regulations to prevent animals carrying rabies and other infectious diseases from entering the U.S.

Altogether, about 750 CDC employees received termination letters over the weekend, according to a current CDC staffer who was on a call with agency leadership and another who reviewed an internal memo.

At the National Institutes of Health, between 1,000 and 1,200 employees received notification Saturday night that they were being cut, two staffers with knowledge of the situation told NPR.

Staffers that work on drug approvals were temporarily spared, a current FDA employee told NPR.

NPR reviewed termination letters sent to staff at the CDC, NIH and FDA. All of them used similar language and cited inadequate performance as the reason for their firing — yet the employees that NPR spoke with had records of stellar work.

"Unfortunately, the Agency finds you are not fit for continued employment because your ability, knowledge and skills do not fit the Agency's current needs, and your performance has not been adequate to justify further employment at the Agency," the letters from the Office of the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, states.

The letters set a termination date effective March 14, 2025. At all three agencies, most who lost their jobs were staff in their probationary periods — a prolonged trial of one to two years for new employees or those who have moved to new positions within the agency — who have fewer worker protections.

At NIH, offices involved in reviewing and administering grants to researchers outside the agency, such as at universities and medical centers, were hit hard, one staffer with knowledge of the situation said. The NIH spends most of the agency's $48 billion annual budget on this kind of "extramural" research to find new cures for cancer, heart disease and other diseases.

At CDC, fellows who respond to disease outbreaks from at least two celebrated CDC training programs were cut. Twenty fellows in the Laboratory Leadership Service received termination letters on Saturday. They "help develop the tests for new and emerging diseases," one fellow explains. Those in the program have doctoral degrees, and are often co-deployed with fellows in the Epidemic Intelligence Service for outbreak responses.

It's also not clear how the firings will save the government money, says Patti Zettler, a law professor at Ohio State University who served as Deputy General Counsel to HHS, covering the FDA, until January. For instance, FDA user fees, paid by drug and device makers, began in the 1990s to speed up things like drug and device approvals. In exchange for the fees, the agency commits to hiring more staff and reviewing applications for new products more quickly.

"When we think about all of the layoffs across HHS, none of them are going to save the taxpayer money in the long run," she says. "It is especially clear that laying off FDA staff who are funded by user fees will not save the taxpayers any money. The taxpayers are not paying for these employees."