As many as 1,300 employees with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are slated to be let go as soon as Friday, cutting the public health agency’s workforce by 10%.
The cuts, reported by multiple publications, come a day after Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed by the Senate and sworn into office.
Senior officials were told Friday morning that about 5,200 probationary employees and recent hires would be released across HHS, Stat reported. The firings will affect both the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.
HHS communications director Andrew Nixon told the Washington Examiner in a statement that his department was “taking action to support the president’s broader efforts to restructure and streamline the federal government.
“This is to ensure that HHS better serves the American people at the highest and most efficient standard,” said Nixon.
During an interview on Thursday evening with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Kennedy said he has a “generic list” of the people he wants to remove from the department, saying that he would target people with strong connections to the pharmaceutical industry.
“If you’ve been involved in good science, you have got nothing to worry about,” Kennedy said Thursday night.
Kennedy, who has built a career litigating against pharmaceutical companies and vaccine manufacturers, has stressed the need to use “gold-standard science” in public health research institutions, including the CDC and NIH.
The former environmentalist Democrat-turned-Trump administration health guru went through a hotly contested confirmation process due to his long history of vaccine skepticism and his refusal to recant the debunked claim that vaccines cause autism.
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During his failed independent presidential campaign, Kennedy told the Washington Examiner in 2023 that he planned to reform NIH overnight should he win the presidency.
On Thursday, at his swearing-in ceremony, Kennedy praised President Donald Trump and thanked him for the opportunity to address the childhood chronic disease epidemic.
