The emails began arriving on the eve of April Fool’s Day, but they were no joke. Four directors and one acting director of the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH’s) 27 institutes and centers learned they were being put on leave and offered alternative jobs with the Indian Health Service (IHS) in Alaska, Oklahoma, or other locations far from the agency’s Maryland campus near Washington, D.C. Many leaders at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were also placed on leave and given the same option, with less than 2 days to choose a preferred location.
In the hours that followed, the workforce purge led by the White House’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) spread. Reduction-in-force (RIF) notices were emailed to an estimated 10,000 employees within the Department of Health and Human Services. Many HHS staffers learned they had been dismissed when they showed up at their offices and found their security badges deactivated.
Last week was the most chaotic and punishing yet for federal scientists and other workers at health agencies under the administration of President Donald Trump. With a goal of increased efficiency and cost savings, the RIF gutted offices and programs at FDA and CDC that focused on everything from new drugs to reducing HIV infections to preventing lead poisoning in children.
The chaos deepened as, contrary to expectations, the RIF swept up NIH scientists as well. When HHS officials announced the cuts a week earlier, they said the reductions at the biomedical agency would result mainly from consolidating administrative functions. Support personnel at many of the institutes and centers—communications staff, for example—did lose their jobs. But researchers including 11 senior researchers at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) also received RIF notices. Among them was Parkinson’s disease researcher Richard Youle, who last year received the Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences, a prestigious $3 million award funded by tech leaders.
More whiplash followed. An NIH slide presentation seen by Science said its overall RIF was based on administrative codes and that some firings “may have not been intentional.” Indeed, after an uproar over the NINDS neuroscientists, officials there blamed their removals on a “coding error” and asked them to unofficially return to work while promising the terminations would be reversed.
HHS didn’t comment on the NINDS reinstatements but acknowledged there may have been “erroneous” firings. And HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. began walking back other firings at FDA and CDC, saying he expected 20% of the cuts to be reversed. “Personnel that should not have been cut, were cut,” Kennedy told reporters on 3 April. “We’re reinstating them. … Part of the DOGE, we talked about this from the beginning, is we’re going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstated, because we’ll make mistakes.” Kennedy also said the lead poisoning program could be restored.
Kennedy did not, however, address the removals of so many senior HHS scientific leaders including institute directors at NIH, who were put on leave even before its new leader, Jayanta “Jay” Bhattacharya, started on 1 April. Nor did he say whether Bhattacharya signed off on the leadership changes.
“Going after these people without due cause or process is outrageous,” says former NIH Director Harold Varmus, who led the agency in the 1990s. “Where is the evidence that these people are not functioning properly? If [Bhattacharya] believes so much in evidence, why doesn’t he show that people being fired have been derelict in their duties?”
Another former NIH director also expressed dismay. “Tremendously valuable research programs … have been directed by these talented leaders. It is impossible to see how great harm will not come to their important lifesaving work as a result of these actions,” says cancer researcher Monica Bertagnolli, who left NIH in January, paving the way for Bhattacharya.
Research advocates, public health groups, and Democrats in Congress also decried the overall HHS cuts as harmful. “These actions are likely to slow scientific advancement and negatively impact the health and well-being of the American people,” the Association of American Medical Colleges said in a statement.
The leadership cuts hit hard at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which has drawn the wrath of Trump supporters because of its role in battling the COVID-19 pandemic. NIAID Director Jeanne Marrazzo, who replaced longtime Director Anthony Fauci less than 2 years ago, was among those offered an IHS reassignment, as was Clifford Lane, an NIAID division director and a confidant of Fauci’s. A second division director was also put on leave. Even Fauci’s wife, Christine Grady, who headed NIH’s bioethics department, was put on leave and offered an IHS job.
Other NIH institute directors who lost their jobs include Diana Bianchi, director of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; Eliseo Pérez-Stable, director of the minority health institute; Shannon Zenk, who headed the nursing institute; and Vence Bonham, who had been named acting director of the genome institute just 2 weeks earlier. The deputy director and scientific director of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) were also put on leave, but Luigi Ferrucci, the scientific director, was later told to return to work.
In the past, many NIH critics have called for limiting the terms of institute directors, some of whom stay in the job for decades. But the RIF didn’t include the two current institute directors with the longest tenures: Nora Volkow, who has headed the National Institute on Drug Abuse for 22 years, and Richard Hodes, who had been NIA director since 1993.
Science has viewed one NIH director’s reassignment letter, which stated that HHS “proposes to reassign you [to IHS] as part of a broader effort to strengthen the Department and more effectively promote the health of the American people.” The options included several regions “with the greatest need,” including locations in Minnesota and Montana.
The FDA leaders placed on leave and given a similar reassignment offer included directors of the tobacco center and the office that reviews new drugs. “This will certainly slow things down,” one FDA employee said, especially given that the director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which oversees the new drugs office, resigned in January.
The cuts follow the forced resignation last week of Peter Marks, who directed FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research for more than a decade. Marks decried the changes at FDA in an interview in The Wall Street Journal. “They broke something without real plans to fix it, because the people who were doing the breaking didn’t have any idea,” he said. “They took the place apart without having an instruction manual of how to put it back together.” HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said Marks had no place at FDA if he did “not want to get behind restoring science to its golden standard and promoting radical transparency.”
The cuts went far beyond institute leaders and top officials. NIH lost 1300 people, according to an internal document, more than 6% of its workforce. At FDA and CDC, 3500 and 2400 employees, respectively, got the dreaded emails. (The cuts came on top of 10,000 HHS departures earlier this year due to buyouts, retirements, and firings of staff new in their positions.)
“It’s chaos—absolute chaos,” said one NIH senior scientist watching the firings unfold. The loss of support staff contributed. Entire procurement offices were eliminated at some institutes, sparking panic as lab orders were frozen, according to several NIH scientists. Some institutes lost most or all of their communications staff.
The cuts at CDC included much of its injury and occupational health centers and many staff in its HIV prevention division. John Brooks, chief medical officer at the division for 10 years before his September 2024 retirement, says the move—together with cuts to other HIV prevention efforts across HHS—may well undo years of progress in slowing transmission of the virus. “New infections [likely] will rise, producing greater cost as well as greater risk of infection to the public,” Brooks says. A CDC branch focused on local partnerships to reduce barriers to vaccine access, such as bringing vaccines to farmers whose nearest pharmacy was more than 80 kilometers away, was also eliminated.
Few of the removed officials would comment publicly. But Molly Kellum, the vaccine partnerships’ ousted chief, wrote on LinkedIn that “CDC was the only place I ever wanted to work,” adding, “unfortunately, my entire branch was eliminated.”
At both NIH and FDA, the new directors have only just arrived—Martin Makary took over at FDA last week. And Trump’s current nominee to be CDC head, acting Director Susan Monarez, has yet to receive a Senate hearing. As a result, it’s not clear whether the leadership shuffles have ended.
Other disruptions loom, including a demand by HHS for all of its agencies to cut their total contracted funding by 35%. At NIH, the cuts could eliminate many contract scientists who help run research labs and halt clinical trials on the NIH campus and beyond, among other impacts. The staff losses at the agencies also come amid wider turmoil in biomedical research, following NIH cuts to hundreds of grants touching on topics such as diversity and gender research, Trump’s threats to freeze or cancel grants to universities whose policies he dislikes, and an order to slash NIH’s overhead payments to universities. A judge has paused the overhead cuts, and court battles could determine the fate of all three moves.
In his initial email to NIH staff, Bhattacharya wrote that he knows he is joining NIH “at a time of tremendous change,” but said it is “an institution that I love” and pledged to “do my best to lead NIH through these reforms, implement new policies humanely, and endeavor to earn your trust.”
Those words rang hollow to some NIH observers. “Is he going to stick up for NIH or simply adhere to whatever he’s told by the secretary?” Varmus asks. Scientists and staff at CDC and FDA may be asking their new bosses similarly tough questions.
More: https://www.science.org/content/article/after-april-fools-day-purge-u-s-health-agencies-spiral-chaos
