Widespread Layoffs, Purge of Leadership Underway at U.S. Health Agencies
Senior leaders across the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were put on leave and countless other employees lost their jobs Tuesday as the Trump administration began a sweeping purge of the agencies that oversee government health programs.
Top officials at the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) were put on administrative leave or offered reassignment to the Indian Health Service. Other employees began receiving layoff notices or learned they had lost their jobs when their entry badges no longer worked Tuesday morning.
At one HHS office in Rockville, Maryland, long lines grew as workers were screened to determine whether they were still employed. “When you get here, it is horrible,” one FDA employee wrote, according to messages reviewed by The Washington Post.
23 States, DC Sue Trump Administration Over Billions in Lost Public Health Funding
Democratic attorneys general and governors in 23 states and Washington, D.C., have filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., alleging that the department’s sudden rollback of $12 billion in public health funding was unlawful and harmful.
In the lawsuit, filed Tuesday, the states are seeking a temporary restraining order and injunctive relief to immediately halt the administration’s funding cuts that they say will lead to key public health services being discontinued and thousands of health-care workers losing their jobs.
Last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) pulled back about $11.4 billion in funding allocated to state and community health departments during the COVID-19 pandemic response. The CDC expects to start recovering this money in about 30 days, according to HHS.
An additional $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration was terminated, according to the attorneys general. HHS said Tuesday it does not comment on ongoing litigation.
Jay Bhattacharya: ‘Fauci’s Pardon Is a Good Thing’
In 2020, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya was condemned as a quack and considered a pariah by the medical field for co-authoring a public declaration questioning the efficacy of COVID-19 lockdowns. One of the most influential people leading the charge against him was Francis Collins, who was then the director of the National Institutes of Health.
In an October 2020 email to Dr. Anthony Fauci that was later leaked online, Collins called Bhattacharya a “fringe epidemiologist,” and urged a “quick and devastating published takedown” of his declaration. In an interview with The Washington Post, Collins went on to call Bhattacharya “dangerous” and his work “not mainstream science.” Around this time, Bhattacharya received death threats from members of the public and was shadow banned on Twitter for his views.
Today, in a sign of how much has shifted in Washington since the change of administration, Bhattacharya is now the new director of the NIH. In his first long-form interview since his confirmation, he told The Free Press that Collins has since apologized for his comments — but only in private.
Public Health Experts Oppose Bills to Restrict Ability to Discuss, Mandate COVID-19 Vaccines
Several physicians and experts testified against two proposals introduced before the Health and Human Services Committee on Monday that they said would undermine public health and spread misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine.
One proposal, LD 871, would prevent the state from requiring healthcare workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19, including emergency medical services personnel. Marygrace Cimino (R-Bridgeton) introduced the bill despite the fact that in 2024 the COVID-19 vaccine was removed from the list of immunizations the state requires healthcare workers to have, based on guidance from the Maine Department of Health and Human Services, although the agency continues to recommend the vaccine.
Given the current lack of a mandate, the legislation “serves no obvious purpose,” said Dr. Sydney Sewall, a pediatrician in Waterville and representative of the Maine Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics. “The motivating force appears to be anti-vaccine sentiment,” he said. “We find it unfortunate that vaccine policy in general and COVID vaccine in particular, has devolved into a partisan issue.”
Fauci’s Successor Put on Leave as RFK Jr. Reshapes Agencies
Jeanne Marrazzo, Anthony Fauci’s successor at the National Institutes of Health, was placed on administrative leave starting on Tuesday and offered a reassignment to a different part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), according to a person familiar with the matter.
Marrazzo was asked to join HHS’s Indian Health Service division, which works to provide health services to American Indian and native Alaskan populations. The reassignment comes as HHS is conducting mass layoffs of around 10,000 employees and restructuring the agency. While initial communications about the layoffs focused on addressing redundancy in human resources, information technology and communications staff, the agency has also removed senior leaders overseeing scientific research and drug review.
Marrazzo, an infectious disease expert, has led the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since the fall of 2023. Marrazzo was told on Monday by Thomas Nagy, HHS’s deputy assistant secretary for human resources, that she was being placed on paid administrative leave and that she should not report to work, according to an email viewed by Bloomberg.
The NIH Canceled My Research on Vaccine Hesitancy
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the demand for vaccines briefly exceeded supply. Across the U.S., state governments decided who should receive priority access to livesaving vaccines. Several vulnerable groups, like people with cancer and the elderly, were consistently and appropriately prioritized. But others, like people with severe mental illness, were not, despite data showing that they were almost three times more likely to die from COVID-19.
As a small step toward redressing this wrong, I asked the National Institutes of Health to prioritize people with severe mental illness by funding research designed to reveal why they are especially likely to be vaccine hesitant (i.e., to reject or delay vaccination despite availability). I hoped that the knowledge gained through this work could be used to encourage people with severe mental illness to get vaccinated, enabling them to protect themselves from preventable morbidity and mortality, even if society continued to not appropriately value them during future infectious disease outbreaks.
To move toward this goal, I planned to examine whether the impact of trust on vaccine intentions differs by participants’ mental health status. History shows that trust is critical for vaccine acceptance. For example, the fake hepatitis vaccination campaign that the Central Intelligence Agency used to find Osama Bin Laden prompted vaccine refusal, fueling the resurgence of paralytic polio in Pakistan.
DC Court Backs HHS in Rejecting Vertex’s Proposed Fertility Support Program for Casgevy Patients
Vertex’s effort to provide fertility support services to those on government insurance programs who want to take the company’s CRISPR Therapeutics-partnered gene therapy Casgevy and maintain their reproductive ability was slapped down in a Washington D.C. federal court, with a judge ruling that the services would violate anti-kickback laws.
The company’s fertility support program proposed offering up to $70,000 for fertility procedures for eligible patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) or transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia who receive Casgevy. Considering that such fertility treatments often aren’t covered by federal insurance programs and some 50% to 60% of those with SCD are enrolled in Medicaid, Vertex figured many of those who may want the one-time curative treatment might be deterred by the reproductive side effects of the chemotherapy that’s required before infusion.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), however, saw the offering as an effort to “remove a financial barrier” that could encourage healthcare providers to recommend more patients to receive the $2.2 million gene therapy versus “competitor drugs or other clinically appropriate treatments,” the agency’s Office of the Inspector General wrote in its advisory opinion.
Trump Officials Will Screen NIH Funding Opportunities
After a 2-month hiatus, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) plans to resume posting notices of new solicitations for grant proposals. But there’s a catch: NIH’s parent federal agency, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and a more recent White House creation, the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), will review each draft notice to ensure the research that will be funded aligns with the priorities of President Donald Trump’s administration, Science has learned from multiple sources within NIH.
A senior NIH official told Science that staff were informed yesterday that each notice will be approved by one person at DOGE and one at HHS. The requirement is “chilling,” the official said because it represents a new level of political interference with NIH’s process for setting scientific priorities.
Grants staff were digesting the news today as Stanford University health economist Jay Bhattacharya, who was confirmed as NIH director by the Senate yesterday, awaits his swearing in. Science has also heard from several NIH employees that DOGE was on NIH’s main campus in Bethesda, Maryland, and nearby sites today checking to see whether employees away from their computers had locked them and had their access cards; some of those who had not were fired.
