Demography of the HHS Department: The State of the Art and a Time-Dependent Report on Senator Pallone, R.F. Kennedy
“[Sec.] Kennedy claims that health care services will not be harmed by the dramatic downsizing, but he is incorrect and everyone who is paying attention knows it.
“The Trump Administration has launched an attack on the federal health workforce, which is why I made the comments I made at the hearing on Tuesday,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Ranking Member Frank Pallone Jr., D-NJ.
“The level of cuts at NIH I am hearing about today is truly mind-boggling,” wrote Jeremy Berg of the University of Pittsburgh, who served as the director of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health, from 2003 to 2011, wrote NPR. ” I try not to be hyperbolic but this seems to be a massacre. … I honestly don’t know where this leads.”
OneNIH employee described the mood at the agency Tuesday as “desperate”. The person that was not fired wanted to remain anonymous because of her fear of losing her job.
Several other leaders received the same offer as Renate and Dr. Pérez-Stable.
The Indian Health Service, a division of the HHS that provides medical care to Indigenous people in the US, has offered to reassign some directors. (The HHS is the parent agency of the NIH.) The HHS wants to reassign directors so that they can better promote the health of the American people, according to an email obtained by Nature. The HHS needs you to deliver the highest quality of service to the underserved community and it’s willing to take you to places such as Alaska, Montana and Oklahoma.
Robert Califf, who served as FDA commissioner twice, stepped down in January, saying the FDA is finished. He was overwhelmed by messages about the staff cuts, and that the agency’s leaders who know most about safety had been let go.
Termination emails went out Tuesday morning to employees and leadership of agencies within HHS, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as several smaller agencies.
On Thursday, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a statement that the layoffs were intended to reduce “bureaucratic sprawl.” He said that the organization was realigned with its core mission and new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic.
“We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of the Brown University School of Public Health, who served as President Biden’s COVID-19 Response Coordinator, told NPR in an interview.
Michael Osterholm, an infectious-diseases epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, has been in the industry for 50 years. “These are going to be huge losses to the research community.”
At the FDA, the entire team that handles communications for the agency lost their jobs, according to staffers who were among those fired. They spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation for publicly criticizing the administration. According to an HHS fact sheet, 3,500 FDA jobs are being eliminated. The FDA’s top vaccine regulator, Dr. Peter Marks, revealed on Friday that he’s been forced out.
The NIH’s top communications officer, Renate Myles, and the Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases
I believe that this will be viewed as a huge mistake by the history of the country. I will be happy if I’m correct, but there isn’t any reason to treat people this way. It will be interesting to hear from the new leadership how they plan to put ‘Humpty Dumpty’ back together again.”
The directors of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities, and the National Institute of Nursing Research were informed late on 31 March. Together, these leaders were in charge of US$9 billion in funding at the NIH.
When asked for a response, the NIH directed Nature to the HHS for comment. The NIH’s top communications officer, Renate Myles, was also placed on administrative leave, according to an agency staff member, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak with the press. The HHS did not respond to Nature’s queries by publication time.
In his first e-mail to agency staff members on 1 April, which was obtained by Nature, Bhattacharya wrote: “These reductions in the workforce will have a profound impact on key NIH administrative functions … and will require an entirely new approach to how we carry them out.”