Officials of agencies of the Ministry of Health and Social Services say that they are preparing for steep layoffs, as secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. And his collaborators are approaching their final decisions on a radical restructuring of the department.
The decisions of Kennedy and his team on changes in the composition and organization of the department are expected in a week or two, have been informed of several senior health officials. An official said aid had started to write a reorganization announcement.
The ministry did not respond to a request for comments.
In addition to the formal chief of the White House Government Department of Effectiveness team, Amy GleasonSeveral other Doge members are HHS employees. Some have been intimately involved in the plans, including the former insurance manager Brad Smithtop Medicine And Medicaid Official at the first Trump administration.
The cuts expected in the department as part of the reorganization and the “reduction of force” plans ordered by the White House intervene after many workers have already been dismissed or released in the country’s health agencies by other movements, as previous attempts To purge thousands of workersFinish scholarship programs and terminate entrepreneurs’ agreements.
Here is the last one we know about the reorganization of several agencies within the HHS, based on conversations with more than a dozen health officials who were not authorized to speak publicly.
Agency for research and quality of health care
The discounts of the workforce deposited by HHS officials and the Doches for certain senior leaders were unprecedented. In an agency within the HHS, the Agency for Research and the Quality of Health Care, DOGE officials told managers on March 11 to expect up to 90% of their staff to be reduced.
The agency has around 300 employees, many of whom are responsible for collecting and analyzing some of the most cited measures of the federal government on health care, in particular Data sets of several decades Monitoring hospitalizations and emergency visits on a national level on which economists and researchers in health policy count.
AHRQ also works on a number of programs funded by the congress to combat patient safety and health accidents, such as a program aimed at fighting against antibiotic -resistant bacteria.
“Current personnel are around 45 economists and highly qualified statisticians. DOGE wants this drafting of six employees in total. The six people who would be willing to stay under these conditions would not be exactly the best,” said a health official at CBS News of cuts to one of the teams of the agency supervising a large federal database on the Federal Data medical expenses.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
At Centers for Disease Control and PreventionSome managers have been invited to expect transmitted discounts from the department who could lead to up to 30% of the agency staff based in Atlanta.
Nearly 12,820 people were employed by the CDC at the end of the last financial year, Federal recordings Show, against 10,487 in the last year of the first Trump administration.
“A 30% reduction would be devastating. We are already in sub-employment in a certain number of key areas and the staff who have barely maintained it together has been at various professional exhaustion stages for five years,” said a CDC official.
Some of these cuts could be made through employees who go voluntarily. The agency managers were informed that around 400 workers had requested early retirement and approximately 600 requested a takeover, said two managers, under Offers made Through the HHS this month. We do not know how many workers have applied for both.
Others could be obtained by reorganizing the functions of the agency. A proposal weighed by civil servants would move the prevention of the HIV of the CDC elsewhere in the department.
Food and Drug Administration
Unlike other health agencies, certain groups of workers Food and Drug Administration They were told that they were not eligible to take the HHS buyout.
This includes new drug requests, whose wages are financed mainly by the costs paid by drug manufacturers when searching for approval, not taxpayers.
Others from the agency have been invited to prepare for layoffs. The FDA managers told employees internally that they were out of the loop on the scale and the targets of the cuts.
DOGE officials have made several visits to the agency’s maryland headquarters, said an official. Another said that DOGE officials asked FDA laboratories this week.
Several FDA employees said they expected that some of the cuts were made thanks to what they called the growing leak of the agency’s brain, which was faced with a difficult transition to the office which is not relaxing soon. Hundreds of retirement requests are processed to the agency, said an employee.
Much more staff work for the FDA than its headquarters is equipped to be at home, have said employees, letting them rush for places in the parking lots and overflowing offices and short of toilet paper in crowded bathrooms.
National Health Institutes
From workforce to National Health InstitutesOfficials expect discounts at levels similar to what was observed at the end of the Trump administration.
More than 21,000 people were employed by the Medical Science Research Agency at the end of the 2024 fiscal year, against 17,705 at the end of the 2019 fiscal year.
As with other agencies, some of the expected cuts may be compensated by the voluntary departures of scientists and other workers. One person said they heard during the meetings that 1,400 had requested buy -back, early retirement or both.
One person said that up to 3,800 employees could be cut off from the agency’s wage bill, if not more, depending on the number of staff members from departures.
Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
The cups of centers for medicre and medicaid services could be smaller, certain suspects, because the agency was already faced with limits to hiring within the framework of the Biden administration.
The agency’s head of the agency said that at the end of last year that he could resume hiring after a turnaround in his finances, inside the police reported in November.
There were 6,557 employees at the Baltimore-based agency in 2024, slightly increasing from 6,074 labor in 2019.
A CMS official said he understood internally that the first pensions and the buyouts noted by the employees in certain parts of the agency were perhaps sufficient to save a large part of the remaining staff of the agency.
Administration of drug addiction and mental health services
Several workers in the administration of drug addiction and mental health services say they have heard nothing from the management of agencies on potential cuts.
Some hope that a letter of the Democrats of the Chamber to Kennedy denounce the reports That half of the agency staff could be cut could avoid stiff layoffs.
The agency’s workforce, which had 916 workers at the end of the last financial year, fell to a hollow of 521 employees at the end of the first Trump administration.
The layoffs earlier this year by DOGE have already resulted in more than 10% Agency staff has been reduced, including employees working on hotlines 988 for people faced with mental health crises.
contributed to this report.