The terminations had a swift impact. The Food and Drug Administration’s top food official resigned Monday, citing the “indiscriminate firing” of 89 staff members from the agency’s food program and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rhetoric toward staff.
“I was looking forward to working to pursue the Department’s agenda of improving the health of Americans by reducing diet-related chronic disease and risks from chemicals in food,” Jim Jones, the FDA’s deputy commissioner for human foods, wrote in a letter — reviewed by The Washington Post — to the agency’s acting commissioner. “It has been increasingly clear that with the Trump Administration’s disdain for the very people necessary to implement your agenda, however, it would have been fruitless for me to continue in this role.”
Overall, several thousand people from the more than 80,000 workers employed at HHS agencies were told they were terminated. All were probationary, meaning they had just a year or two on the job or had recently been promoted. Many worked on issues critical to consumers, such as improving health care, regulating food packaging or responding to infectious-disease outbreaks.
In interviews, they described a bewildering process that often required them to inform their own bosses they had been terminated.
The termination messages cite poor job performance, according to more than half a dozen letters from various agencies obtained by The Post. The people who were fired disputed that characterization.
“Unfortunately, the agency finds that 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 in the agency,” the termination notices state.
The cuts swept across health agencies such as an emergency preparedness office, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the FDA. Patient advocacy groups — as well as current and former employees — expressed deep alarm over the cuts.
“The cumulative effects of threatened cuts to federal health research funding and forced departures at our nation’s premier health agencies will put our global leadership and our nation’s health at risk,” a coalition of patient groups, including the Friends of Cancer Research and the American Diabetes Association, wrote in a joint statement.
This article is based on interviews with more than two dozen current and former officials and other people familiar with the terminations, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
The firings at the nation’s health agencies are part of the Trump administration’s swift overhaul of the federal workforce. Thousands of trial and probationary workers across the government have been fired, and courts have been asked to halt the actions.
Administration officials have cast the effort as an attempt to make the government more efficient and productive.
Kennedy, who was sworn in last week as HHS secretary, has previously stated a desire to clean house at some of the agencies he now oversees — and his allies say massive change is needed to reverse course in America’s explosion of chronic disease.
“Our plans are radical transparency and returning gold standard science [to] NIH, the FDA and CDC, and ending the corporate capture of those agencies,” Kennedy said after being sworn in as HHS secretary.
In a statement, HHS defended the cuts.
“HHS is following the Administration’s guidance and taking action to support the President’s broader efforts to restructure and streamline the federal government,” the department said. “This is to ensure that HHS better serves the American people at the highest and most efficient standard.”
The initial list of terminations at agencies such as the CDC, FDA and NIH was reduced, according to multiple federal health officials. Many employees were notified that they were placed on administrative leave until March 14, when their terminations would take effect.
At the FDA, hundreds of staffers received termination notices, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. That includes those who work on medical devices, tobacco and food.
Those terminated in the food program were working on nutrition, infant formula and food safety response, as well as 10 staff members who were charged with reviewing potentially unsafe chemicals in the nation’s food supply, Jones wrote in his resignation letter.
The FDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An HHS spokesperson thanked Jones for his service, adding that the department welcomes resignations for those “who do not fully align” with the “Make America Healthy Again” initiative.
In late spring, Arielle Kane joined the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’ Innovation Center to help launch a program aimed at reducing maternal mortality and severe complications in 15 states’ Medicaid programs. She received a firing notice Saturday and said she is worried about the future of the project.
At the Atlanta-based CDC, senior leaders were informed Friday that 1,269 people — nearly 10 percent of the agency staff — would receive termination notices. But Friday evening, the CDC was sent a smaller list, with 750 names. It’s not clear whether additional names will be sent, three federal health officials said.
On Tuesday, dozens of protesters gathered in front of the agency’s main campus to protest the firings.
Among those who received notices were about 20 fellows in an elite laboratory science program, about half of whom were deployed across the country, according to a public health official who had direct knowledge of the terminations. The scientists were part of several outbreak investigations, the official said, including those involving skunk rabies, dengue fever and Oropouche, a viral disease spread by small flies and mosquitoes that causes sudden fever and headache, and that turned deadly for the first time last year in Brazil.
About 130 fellows in another elite public health program that assigns them to state and local health agencies also received termination notices. In the past two years, they have responded to fires and flooding in New Mexico, an environmental disaster in San Diego and an ongoing tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas City, said one fellow in his 30s who received a notice. He spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal.
“We are the ones that support most of these outbreaks,” he said. “With these cuts you’re hitting the people actually doing the field work.”
Several employees who had worked at the CDC for years also received termination notices. The staffers had received promotions, bumping them from one hiring authority to the next, which reset their probationary periods, according to two federal health officials.
Anthony Gardner, 48, said he was among those who received a termination notice. Gardner had been a contractor but was hired as a federal employee nearly two years ago.
Gardner’s brother died on the 83rd floor of the North Tower at the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Years later, Gardner became a public affairs specialist for a CDC program that oversees medical monitoring and treatment of first responders and survivors of the attack.
On Saturday, he received a termination notice — along with, he said, 15 of the 90 program employees. Like others who received the notices, Gardner said the reason cited was poor performance, which he argued is not true.
He said he got the top rating — “outstanding” — on each of his last two performance evaluations plus other awards for high performance and excellence.
At NIH, between 1,000 and 1,200 people received letters as of Sunday afternoon, according to two people familiar with the process who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
For some, notices arrived around dinnertime Saturday. Among those recipients was a scientist with specialized skills who was recruited to NIH to build a laboratory focused on speeding up cancer drug discovery.
One project, which aimed to find a way to block a protein that helps cancer cells survive, was set at the end of February to start screening a vast library of molecules to see which ones might be developed into drugs. That work is now effectively paused.
The purge of probationary employees was the latest disruption to shake the world’s premier biomedical research agency, which has been mired in uncertainty and which saw some senior leaders abruptly retire last week.
After the weekend’s firings, Kennedy held an official welcome ceremony at HHS headquarters Tuesday morning. He pledged to usher in “radical transparency” and suggested global trust in the health agencies he now oversees had declined.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/02/18/trump-health-firings-fda-cdc/
