The Trump administration gutted federal health agencies on Tuesday morning, as thousands of employees received layoff notices, following Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement last week he was planning to lay off nearly 10,000 workers.
More than 7,000 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services were cut. Staffers with decades of experience received emails at 5 a.m. on Tuesday that they were being placed on administrative leave and would no longer have access to their buildings, effective immediately. In the Washington D.C. area, thousands of federal workers lined up outside office buildings to see if their badges worked, as they hugged each other in tears.
Kennedy, a vaccine skeptic, is attempting to gut the agencies and remake them in his image. These cuts will allow HHS to consolidate not only authority but messaging, as many of the departments affected involve communications departments. The massive layoffs are part of Donald Trump’s broader purge of the federal workforce, and parallel what Elon Musk is doing with his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which claims to be streamlining the federal government, but is gutting entire agencies. Musk’s DOGE has celebrated the cancellations of NIH grants, something Senator Cory Booker decried during his record-breaking filibuster on Tuesday.
On Tuesday, entire divisions were completely obliterated in a move that shocked HHS staffers. Hundreds of researchers studying diseases like HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases were laid off. “I cannot think of a worse idea than firing the people who help keep us healthy and safe from disease,” Senator Raphael Warnock said on X. This comes at a time when the U.S. is suffering from a nationwide measles outbreak.
Rolling Stone spoke with several current and former staffers about the layoffs, and the impact they will have on Americans for years to come.Editor’s picks
Sweeping cuts
“It’s so chaotic,” says a CDC employee who received notice Tuesday morning that she was being placed on administrative leave and would be terminated in June. (She asked to remain anonymous for fear of legal retribution, so she’ll be referred to by the pseudonym Samantha.) “The amount of knowledge that is being purged today at CDC is just tragic.”
Samantha says she and her colleagues had been constantly checking CDC and HHS Reddit threads since Kennedy announced the layoffs would be happening soon. This morning at 5:45 a.m., when she saw on Reddit that “reduction in force” (RIF) letters had been sent out, she checked her email.
“This RIF action does not reflect directly on your service, performance, or conduct,” read the email, “After you receive this notice, you will be placed on administrative leave and will no longer have building access beginning Tuesday, April 1, unless directed otherwise by your leadership.”
Samantha, who worked at the CDC’s Division of Environmental Health and Science Practice (DEHSP), says her entire division was eliminated. That includes the Asthma and Air Quality Branch, the Lead Poisoning Prevention and Surveillance Branch, the Climate and Health Activity branch, and the Water Food and Environmental Health Services, among others. Approximately 2,400 employees have been impacted in the CDC.
“They are firing whole organizational units,” says Samantha. “These are people that have 30 years of service, people with children, veterans, there was no thought put into trying to retain people that have institutional knowledge.”Related Content
She says her colleagues are shocked at how widespread the impact has been. “I made a joke last week that they are probably going to do this on April Fool’s Day, and now here they are. It’s a big joke to them.” Samantha says people at the highest levels of CDC are still trying to find out who was eliminated because they did not have advance warning about who would be affected.
“Most of the money at CDC does not fund staff, it funds money going out to states, cities, tribes, public health departments, community organizations,” says Samantha. “So when you’re shutting down the lead program, you’re shutting down funding that supports tracking whether lead is in the water or not. Programs that have been around for decades [are] just gone.” And these efforts are notably bipartisan: “We try to tailor our funding opportunities to provide assistance to the areas that are most in need, and when you look at baseline health outcomes and public health infrastructure, that tends to be red states.”
Samantha says she and her colleagues are worried that they won’t get their paychecks next week, because the CDC’s human resources department was heavily impacted by the layoffs. She says she’s also curious if certain employees will be re-hired after being placed on leave, which has happened after other federal workers were haphazardly purged by the Trump administration.
Attacks on women’s health
The cuts swept across divisions and erased entire departments, without regard to necessity or experience. The majority of employees in the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention were laid off, including the entire intimate partner violence prevention team. The CDC’s Freedom of Information Act office, which responds to public records requests, was disbanded, as was a program studying gun violence prevention. Firearms remain the leading cause of death for children.
Reproductive health and infertility researchers also received RIFs Tuesday — at a time when Americans’ reproductive health care is particularly vulnerable. Two of the three branches in the Division of Reproductive Health were eliminated, the only one left standing was the Maternal and Infant Health branch. The employees that were laid off included researchers who worked on IVF, pregnancy risk assessments, and contraception guidelines.
“You don’t expect your whole program to be wiped out,” a staffer in the reproductive health division tells Rolling Stone. “It’s heartbreaking.”
For example, the team that worked on the contraception guidelines all received emails that they were let go today. The guidelines are used as a standard of care by OB-GYNs, midwives, and primary care doctors.
“Without CDC’s contraception guidelines, more women will die as pregnancy is the most dangerous thing a 20 or 30 year old will do in the U.S.,” adds the staffer.
A “bloodbath”
“Shitshow is an understatement for what just happened at the CDC,” a former CDC staffer tells Rolling Stone. “What’s especially concerning is that the entire CDC FOIA office has been fired. Without a FOIA team now the American people have significantly less transparency into what the CDC is doing and puts the agency at significant legal risk for not complying with FOIA requests for information.”
Another former HHS staffer says, “This bloodbath was so fucking bad I had multiple officials asking me if I thought this was an April Fools joke. We were preparing for the worst and it sure looks like we got it.”
The layoffs included 1,200 positions at the National Institute of Health (NIH) and 3,500 at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Dr. Robert Califf, the former FDA commissioner under Obama and Biden, called it a “dark day for public health.”
“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,” wrote Califf in a LinkedIn post. “I believe that history will see this as a huge mistake.”
Jay Bhattacharya started his first day as NIH director on Tuesday and sent an email to staff, obtained by Rolling Stone. “I recognize that I am joining NIH at a time of tremendous change,” wrote Bhattacharya, acknowledging the layoffs. “These reductions in the workforce will have a profound impact on key NIH administrative functions, including communications, legislative affairs, procurement, and human resources, and will require an entirely new approach to how we carry them out.”
Bhattacharya, a Stanford University professor, notably slammed lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, criticizing the vaccine and promoting herd immunity as a mitigation strategy instead. Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy urged Bhattacharya not to waste NIH funds on researching a debunked link between vaccines and autism, but Bhattacharya has signaled he’s still open to the idea. On Tuesday, Cassidy, along with Senator Bernie Sanders, invited Kennedy to testify before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions committee about the extensive HHS reorganization. Kennedy hasn’t publicly responded.
“People feel devastated and hopeless”
Human resources, IT, communications, security, and budget departments were all significantly impacted, as the Trump administration consolidates power at HHS.
A tenured principal investigator at NIH who leads a neuroscience lab tells Rolling Stone that the layoffs have completely shaken up the agency. “Even though the surface message is that they’re keeping the scientists, without the support staff, we can’t do our science,” they say.
“People today feel devastated and hopeless,” says the neuroscientist, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of losing their job. “When the HHS Secretary talked about the need to invest in science and medicine, it felt like they wanted us to be able to achieve our mission. But what’s happening today — we feel like the rug’s being swept out from under us, and we don’t know who’s not going to be safe tomorrow.”
Several senior leaders at both the CDC and NIH were reassigned from HHS to Indian Health Services (IHS), which provides medical resources to Native American Tribes, multiple sources confirmed. The positions could require relocating to more rural locations like Alaska, Montana, and New Mexico. Because the jobs are far away from their homes, some officials saw it as a way to force them out. They were also concerned that if they rejected the reassignment, this could risk them losing their pensions.
Some scientists with career tenure were told they were let go, creating additional confusion as supervisors try to sort out if this was a mistake or not. “It feels like nobody’s safe,” says the neuroscientist.
Another senior NIH scientist says, “The bottom line is we just can’t do any work. No one expected [this] level of damage.”Trending Stories
They say that there is a vast misunderstanding of how specialized and interconnected the teams are at NIH, and unlike corporate layoffs, a couple weeks of disruption could impact public health for years.
“When it comes to layoffs and RIFs, people are thinking it’s like Google where you fire a bunch of people and then you hire more new people to replace them,” they say. “These people are world experts, there’s very few of them that have incredibly specialized expertise. People build labs for years and years, the lab teams are very interconnected and sensitive. If you take one or two of these people out, it breaks everything.”
