USA: Trump’s firings strike the nation’s health agencies

The United State's health agencies were upended over the weekend by a confusing, slow-motion rollout of terminations that left staff worried about the future of various projects, including those to improve maternal health, discover new cancer treatments and provide help for 9/11 responders.

Several thousand probationary employees across the Department of Health and Human Services were notified they would be terminated after four weeks of leave — fired in what some are calling a “Valentine’s Day massacre.” The termination notices, which arrived over the weekend, capped a chaotic week of speculation about when the cuts would come and who would be affected.

The terminations had a swift impact. The Food and Drug Administration’s top food official resigned Monday, citing the “indiscriminate firing” of 89 staff members from the agency’s food program and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s rhetoric toward staff.

Overall, several thousand people from the more than 80,000 workers employed at HHS agencies were told they were terminated. All were probationary, meaning they had just a year or two on the job or had recently been promoted. Many worked on issues critical to consumers, such as improving health care, regulating food packaging or responding to infectious-disease outbreaks.

In interviews, they described a bewildering process that often required them to inform their own bosses they had been terminated.

The cuts swept across health agencies such as an emergency preparedness office, the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and more. Patient advocacy groups — as well as current and former employees — expressed deep alarm over the cuts.

“The cumulative effects of threatened cuts to federal health research funding and forced departures at our nation’s premier health agencies will put our global leadership and our nation’s health at risk,” a coalition of patient groups, including the Friends of Cancer Research and the American Diabetes Association, wrote in a joint statement.

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Source: The Washington Post, 18 February 2025