Workers In several federal health agencies from the Ministry of Health and Social Services, have received practically identical letters on Saturday evening informing them that they would be terminated from their posts, sources told CBS News.
“Unfortunately, the agency notes that you are not suitable for continuous employment because your capacities, knowledge and skills do not correspond to the current needs of the agency, and your performance has not been sufficient to justify a Additional employment to the agency “, reads the letter obtained by CBS News.
The letter was signed by Jeffrey Anoka, acting human resources chief for the Ministry of Health and Social Services. A health official told CBS News that thousands of letters were sent on Saturday.
Probation workers are those who generally have less than a year of work and are easier to dismiss than other members of federal staff.
CBS News
This decision arrives in the middle Government effort To cut probationary workers by the Working group on the effectiveness of the Ministry of the Governmentor DOGE, led by the billionaire Elon Musk.
More than 5,000 health agencies for health agencies had initially been planned to be released, but not all received dismissal letters on Saturday. Certain letters were also mistakenly sent to people who were not intended to be released, officials said.
Some agencies have also obtained exemptions for part of their staff on the blocking, while the counterpouss rose on cups in agencies like the Indian Health Service.
The CDC epidemic intelligence service was also on the final list of the Trump administration cuts, the “detective of the disease” of the agency, learned CBS News. Officials supervising the scholarship initially warned the health services and those of their ranks that they would be divided by two.
The scholarship programs elsewhere in the agency were not so lucky. The officials said that the CDC public health partner program, which places recent graduates in health services across the country, has been cut.
The other agencies that lose Saturday staff include the administration for strategic preparation and response, which oversees the country’s pandemic stocks, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the National Institutes of Health.
A White House official said on Saturday that workers exempt from the cuts included scientists from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and FDA, Medicare workers and health care providers.
“It is not a random effort of the deletion of us, who we can” escape “with the deletion of him. This is an effort calculated to rationalize bureaucracy,” said the manager.
Calley means, an advisor for newly sworn The Secretary of Health and Social Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., defended the layoffs for reasons beyond the cost savings, reiterating a criticism carried out during the presidential campaign of President Trump that the managers n ‘had not done enough to address drivers of slippery life expectancy in the United States
“It would be irrational not to make changes,” wrote means in an article to X.
At the FDA, an employee said on Saturday that scientists, engineers and a lawyer had been among those who were dismissed from the regulation agency on Saturday evening.
The cuts included parts of the FDA largely financed from the costs that companies pay when they submit requests, not taxpayers’ dollars – such as centers supervising the regulation of tobacco and medical devices.
The toll inflicted by this week’s cuts extends beyond workers and probation scholarship holders. Many entrepreneurs, who have fewer protections than agency staff, were suddenly informed this week that they were abandoned.
A former CDC entrepreneur said they had been one of the two people in a small team from the Atlanta -based agency who knew how to use a project to analyze electronic health files for disease monitoring.
The only other person who knew how to use the project was a CDC employee still in probation.
“I fear that they are not invaded by work and will end up abandoning many projects. The projects were already starting to fall while I was there,” said the former CDC entrepreneur.
Many scientists to whom CBS News have spoken have declared that they had uprooted their lives to have the opportunity to serve the federal government, sometimes taking steep salary reductions in what they could win in the university world or the private sector . Others had been in probation for staff positions after many years of work for the same agency as an entrepreneur.
A former scientist of the National Institutes of Health said they had been reassured at a tears meeting with their supervisors on Friday that the decision had nothing to do with their performance and had received praise for the progress they had done since their hiring.
“Words cannot express correctly how financially I am screwed,” said the former NIH scientist.