Experts Alarmed As Trump Administration Keeps Slashing Jobs At Health Agencies

The spin from the Trump Administration is that the cuts are necessary to streamline the federal government.

As the Trump administration continues to cut jobs en masse across the Health and Human Services Department, officials continue to stress that the mass layoffs instituted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a department that isn’t even official, are methodical and necessary.

According to Politico, individuals inside the agencies do not agree with the position of Trump administration officials, who, in some cases, did not know which employees were getting fired or even why they were fired.

As Reshma Ramachandran, a Yale health professor who also chairs the FDA task force of a non-profit organization, Doctors for America, told Politico, the cuts appear to be coming from Robert F. Kennedy Jr, the new HHS secretary.

“On day one, the new HHS secretary is gutting the agencies that would be necessary to make America healthy again,” Ramachandran said.

However, a former HHS employee pointed to DOGE as the source of some of the cuts because some seemed to run counter to the policy aims of Trump administration officials, including those of RFK Jr., resulting in chaos.

“You’ve got policy people operating on a policy vision, but then you have DOGE,” the former HHS employee told Politico. “Nobody knows who those people are. They are coming from the shadows, and they’ve got their own set of priorities.”

According to NBC News, the firing of around two dozen workers who made up the Laboratory Leadership Service, or LLS, a group responsible for training public health laboratory staffers and supporting outbreak response efforts, is particularly concerning.

The United States is dealing with an aggressive strain of the flu virus and a potential outbreak of Avian Flu.

According to a senior official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Even if EIS (Epidemic Intelligence Service) is spared, there are multiple other fellowships that were not, and that’s a pipeline for the next generation of CDC leaders. We’re being cut off at the knees. It is going to cripple public health for decades.”

In a written statement to NBC News, Andrew Nixon, the director of communications for the Department of Health and Human Services, said the cuts are necessary to streamline the federal government to ensure that HHS better serves the American people at the highest and most efficient standard.”

But Dr. Georges Benjamin, the executive director of the American Public Health Association, told NPR that cutting 1,300 jobs (or 10% of the CDC’s workforce) are “indiscriminate, poorly-thought-out layoffs” that will end up being “very destructive to the core infrastructure of public health.”

According to Katelyn Jetelina, an epidemiologist and the author of Your Local Epidemiologist, “CDC is the health warning system for the United States. CDC needs change, but doing it so drastically and so aggressively with an axe instead of a scalpel is incredibly dangerous to the biosecurity in the United States.”