The employees of the Department of Health and Human Services began receiving mass dismissals on Tuesday, days after HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced that 10,000 people would lose their work, including employees who work in use of tobacco, mental health and job security.
The dismissals are expected to affect 3,500 employees in the Food and Drug Administration and 2,400 employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, almost a fifth of the workforce in both public health divisions, which are under the HHS.
In total, and including approximately 10,000 people who have gone in recent months through early retirement programs or deferred resignation, HHS general personnel will fall from 82,000 to around 62,000, or approximately a fourth of their workforce.
As the news of the cuts extended, the employees were in long lines outside their offices in Washington, DC, Maryland and Georgia, some expected for hours while security determined if they could be left in the building or not. In some cases, the employees were delivered after being informed that they no longer had a job.
Federal workers expect online to access the Mary E. Switzer Memorial building that houses the United States Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, DC, April 1, 2025.
Roberto Schmidt/AFP through Getty Images
Kevin Caron, a health scientist within the office on smoking and health at the CDC, said that most of the office was fired on Tuesday, including his own role in the branch that focused on epidemiology.
The moment is particularly stressful, he said, because his wife has 38 weeks pregnant with the couple’s first child, a girl, and can no longer take the 12 weeks of paternity license that was approved to take from April.
“It is absolutely a loss of security, financial security, the ability to be close and be a father, because I need to find another job,” said Caron.
The Smoking and Health office is described on the CDC website as “the main federal agency for the prevention and control of the integral tobacco.” The office distributes money to all states of the United States to prevent and reduce smoking, vapeo and use of nicotine products, especially among young people.
The office is within the National Center for Chronic Diseases and Health Promotion in CDCs, which has also been affected by layoffs in other divisions, also, multiple officials tell ABC News, a surprise for many, given Kennedy’s commitment to put an end to chronic disease.
“Tobacco is the main cause of preventable death in the US. It is a serious producer of chronic diseases. And so I am a little surprised that despite the fact that this is a declared priority, that they get rid of such work,” Caron said.
In the FDA, tobacco work was also very affected, including the shot of the best Brian King tobacco regulator, which had worked to reduce the rates of use of electronic cigarettes by adolescents.
The impact on tobacco throughout the HHS occurs after President Donald Trump as a candidate promised to “save vapeo” and reverse efforts to ban it.
Mitch Zeller, predecessor of King at the Tobacco Products Center, told ABC News that he learned of King’s departure through conversations with people inside the FDA. Zeller said King had the option of moving to a remote office of the Indian health service.
Zeller said two key offices in the center were “completely cracks.”
“If it ranks the operational function of the center, as well as the center’s ability to make a prospective policy, the center has really eviscerated and its ability to fulfill its public health mission,” he said.
King did not respond to a request for comments.
Jeff Nesbit, a former FDA official who was instrumental in the FDA efforts to begin regulating tobacco, said the cuts “will substantially help tobacco companies to maintain the status quo.”
“These personnel cuts to the FDA tobacco center will allow the industry to continue selling mortal burned cigarettes for many more years than they would otherwise; while continuing to speak in lazy and general terms about whether the vapeo and electronic cigarettes could some day replace burned cigarettes,” said Nesbit, who was also a senior official HHS official under former President Joe Biden.
In the agency that focuses on the use of drugs and mental health, the administration of substance and mental health services (Samhsa), an entire team that supervises a national survey that has been in use since 1971, was reduced, Jennifer Hoenig, director of the National Survey on Drugs and Health Use, wrote on LinkedIn.
“We are the only national survey that focuses specifically on the use of drugs and mental health,” Hoenig wrote.
The office was also working on research on illegal access to fentanyl and mental health treatment, he said.
“I don’t know who will continue with this work, or if he will,” he said, because many employees throughout Samhsa had been fired.
In a federal office that investigates security in the workplace, even for firefighters, mining workers, retail workers, truck drivers and factor workers, approximately 90% of the workforce was expected to be fired, said the director of the National Institute of Occupational Health and Safety in a call with leadership on Monday, a source familiar with the situation said.
NIOSH research investigates and investigates labor problems that inform the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, or OSHA, an agency under the Labor Department that enforces safety and health in the workplace.
“It seems that the majority or much of the agency will be eliminated,” said David Michaels, who led OSHA from 2009 to 2017 and is a professor at the Milken Institute of Public Health at George Washington University. Michaels said he had been talking to many employees in NIOSH and OSHA.
“It makes Osha’s work tremendously more difficult if Niosh’s research disappears,” Michaels said. “There will be less and less protective standards that leave Osha.”
