Just before 9 a.m. Thursday in Washington, D.C, the Department of Health and Human Services sent out a press release with the subject line: “HHS Announces Transformation to Make America Healthy Again.” The transformation: 10,000 full-time employees will be fired. Twenty-eight of the department’s divisions will be cut down to 15 and the number of regional offices halved.

For hours, the 650 words in the press release were all the details some HHS employees had about a reorganization that will significantly shrink an agency responsible for overseeing much of the country’s healthcare.

An hour after the press release went out, around 10 a.m., an employee at the National Institutes of Health opened a Reddit forum for federal employees and saw a post with the restructuring announcement. “My heart goes out to all the HHS employees,” one user commented. “This is all bull***,” another said.

This is how the NIH employee learned of layoffs that, combined with voluntary dismissals, buyouts and early retirements, will cut HHS’s staff by a quarter.

It was hours later when the worker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, finally received direct notice of the cuts.

The planned layoffs will target administrative functions like human resources, information technology and procurement — what HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described as “bureaucratic sprawl.” It will also shift the department’s functions to align more closely with Kennedy’s priorities, such as addressing chronic diseases.

At the Food and Drug Administration, some 3,500 staff, or about 20% of the agency, will be let go. More than 2,000 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be cut, along with 1,200 employees at the NIH, which was already in turmoil from major changes to how it funds and reviews scientific research. 

Beyond those high-level numbers, however, few details are available — even still to staff — on how those cuts will be distributed across individual agencies. And while HHS claims core functions, such as drug reviews at FDA or the administration of Medicare at CMS, won’t be affected, many outside of the agencies are skeptical.

“The administration’s claims that such deep cuts to the Food and Drug Administration and other critical HHS offices won’t be harmful are preposterous,” said Doreen Greenwald, national president of the National Treasury Employees Union, which represents some HHS workers. 

Robert Califf, who led the FDA during the Obama and Biden administrations, said administrative cuts can still hamper product development and assessment. “The work at FDA is highly interactive across areas of expertise,” he wrote in an email. 

Even Kennedy, who said HHS bureaucracy has harmed Americans’ health, acknowledged in comments on the social media platform X that the coming cuts would be a “painful period” for the agency. 

Throughout HHS, many managers across departments that will be downsized, moved or absorbed were surprised by the reorganization. All the HHS employees interviewed for this story asked for anonymity so they could speak freely about their experience. 

One longtime lawyer with the HHS told Healthcare Dive their department leaders were unaware of the restructuring. “It caught a lot of management off guard,” the lawyer said. “They had been concerned, but nobody really knew anything specific.”

Another employee at the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health said their director was given no input or information about the restructuring and had met with other division directors to seek answers.

“Everything is word of mouth these days,” the CDRH employee said.

An employee at the Administration for Children and Families had not heard additional details about the restructuring from their department heads as of Friday morning, outside of those shared in Thursday’s press release.

Democratic lawmakers and some former HHS leaders criticized the cuts and said they were likely to compromise the agency’s mission.

Xavier Becerra, former HHS Secretary under former President Joe Biden, said the cuts had “the makings of a manmade disaster” in a Thursday post on X.