The clock is ticking for federal health employees.
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)—a highly consequential umbrella agency that employees more than 80,000 people across the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and several other offices—has given staff a deadline of tomorrow to express interest in taking a buyout of up to $25,000, pre-tax, as part of the broader purge of federal workers. One of my latest stories, based on interviews with several HHS employees as well as internal emails I obtained, reports on the quandary facing federal health workers. They could leave jobs that they love to escape the chaos President Trump, Elon Musk, and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have unleashed, or stay and try to fight for public health. Meanwhile, officials seem hellbent on undermining them and imposing burdensome working conditions.
Those efforts have included ending or limiting funding for research on vaccine hesitancy, studying disproven potential connections between vaccine and autism, and forcing employees to spend hours complying with Trump's anti-transgender and anti-DEI executive orders. "I had two grant applications where I had to tell people, 'you need to go back and take up every single reference to DEI in this application because we can’t fund it,'" a worker in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), an agency that oversees child welfare programs, told me. Recently, the worker—who plans to take the buyout—spent four hours combing through hundreds of pages of documents to eliminate DEI-related language. "It’s insulting," she said. "They’re just trying to push people out."
That's part of the challenge for HHS employees: If they don't take the buyout, they worry they could be fired anyway, given that today is also the deadline for agency heads to come up with "reorganization plans" to implement "large-scale reductions in force," based on one of Trump’s executive orders, according to the Office of Personnel Management. A CDC researcher who studies infectious diseases and plans to reject the buyout summed it up best. "I hope I do not get let go," she said, "but if I do, I don’t worry about myself as much as I worry about who will do the work if we are gone."
Check out the full story to hear more from her and others about what's happening inside HHS and its implications for public health.
—Julianne McShane
