The email sent to some at the FDA said staffers should check their email for a possible notice that their jobs would be eliminated, which would also halt their access to government buildings. An FDA employee shared the email with AP on condition of anonymity, because they weren’t authorized to disclose internal agency matters.
Kennedy has criticized the department he oversees as an inefficient "sprawling bureaucracy" and said the department's $1.7 trillion yearly budget "has failed to improve the health of Americans." He plans to streamline operations and fold entire agencies — such as the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration — into a new Administration for a Healthy America.
Anand Parekh, who worked worked at the department during the Bush and Obama administrations and is now the chief medical adviser at the Bipartisan Policy Center, wonders what kind of analysis Kennedy has done to arrive at job cuts. He questioned how closely Kennedy could examine each of the agencies after spending just over a month as health secretary.
“One would hope that as they made these cuts, they really did a deep dive,” Parekh said. “It’s not quite clear from a transparency perspective how they got from where they were to here.”
On Friday, dozens of federal health employees working to stop infectious diseases from spreading were told they'd be put on leave.
Several current and former federal officials told the AP that the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy was hollowed out that night. Some employees posted on LinkedIn about the office emptying. And an HIV and public health expert who works directly with the office was emailed a notice saying that all staff had been asked to leave. The expert spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity over fears of losing future work on the issue.
Several of the office’s advisory committees — including the National Vaccine Advisory Committee and others that advise on HIV/AIDs response — have had their meetings canceled.
“It puts a number of important efforts to improve the health of Americans at risk,” said Dr. Robert H. Hopkins Jr., the former chair of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, an advisory committee of the office.
An HHS official said the office is not being closed but that the department is seeking to consolidate the work and reduce redundancies.
Also, as of Monday, a website for the Office of Minority Health was disabled, with an error message saying the page “does not exist.”
Beyond layoffs at federal health agencies, cuts have begun at state and local health departments as a result of an HHS move last week to pull back more than $11 billion in COVID-19-related funds.
Local and state health officials are still assessing the impact, but some health departments have already identified hundreds of jobs that stand to be eliminated because of lost funding, “some of them overnight, some of them are already gone,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
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Associated Press writer Carla K. Johnson in Seattle contributed reporting.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP