The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has initiated the layoffs that will impact roughly 10,000 of its employees as part of the reorganization announced last week, with staffers receiving emails Tuesday morning of their dismissal.
Sources within the agency told The Associated Press at least four directors of the 27 institutes in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were put on administrative leave and nearly all communications staff were fired.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the layoffs last week, acknowledging it would be a “painful period for HHS.”
Former HHS staffers, including those who were just laid off, took to social media to decry the layoffs and warned that the functions of HHS offices would suffer as a result.
Robert Califf, former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), said the agency was effectively “finished.”
“The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed. I believe that history will see this a huge mistake,” Califf wrote on LinkedIn.
“I will be glad if I’m proven wrong, but even then there is no good reason to treat people this way.”
Jennifer Hoenig, director of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), relayed that she and an entire team at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) had been terminated as part of the reorganization’s Reduction in Force (RIF).
“If you need data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health going forward #NSDUH, don’t,” Hoenig wrote in a LinkedIn post.
“This morning myself and the entire team of the Office of Population Surveys in SAMHSA, the team overseeing all of NSDUH, were RIF’d. My office, OPS, was staffed the by the brightest, most dedicated, and statistically savvy scientists who care deeply about improving the lives of Americans.”
“We are the only national survey focusing specifically on drug use and mental health. We had planned briefs coming up on illegally made fentanyl, mental health treatment access, and of course the 2024 NSDUH data release,” she added. “I don’t know who will continue on with this work, or if it will, as CBHSQ scientists were let go en masse.”
