by Brandon Roberts, Annie Waldman and Pratheek Rebala, illustrations by Sam Green for ProPublica

When the Trump administration announced massive cuts to federal health agencies earlier this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he was getting rid of excess administrators who were larding the government with bureaucratic bloat.

But a groundbreaking data analysis by ProPublica shows the administration has cut deeper than it has acknowledged. Though Kennedy said he would add scientists to the workforce, agencies have lost thousands of them, along with colleagues who those scientists depended on to dispatch checks, fix computers and order lab supplies, enabling them to do their jobs.

Done in the name of government efficiency, these reductions have left departments stretching to perform their basic functions, ProPublica found, according to interviews with more than three dozen former and current federal employees.

Food and drug facility inspectors are having to go to the store and buy supplies on their own dime so they can take swab samples to test for pathogens.

Some labs have been unable to purchase the sterile eggs needed to replicate viruses or the mice needed to test vaccines.

And less than five years after a pandemic killed more than a million Americans, scientists who study infectious diseases are struggling to pay for saline solution, gloves and blood to feed lab mosquitos.

The Trump administration has refused to say how many workers have been lost so far. But ProPublica’s analysis reveals the cuts in unprecedented detail.

More than 3,000 scientists and public health specialists are gone.

Over 1,000 regulators and safety inspectors have also left.

In total, more than 20,500 workers, or about 18% of the Department of Health and Human Services’ workforce, have left or been pushed out, according to ProPublica’s analysis of federal worker departures using public information from the HHS employee directory.

The analysis is an undercount — it doesn’t include the hundreds or even thousands of workers who have received layoff notices but remain on administrative leave.

No health agency has been spared, with some important divisions losing more than 1 in 5 workers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in charge of public health, lost 15% of its staff; the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, 16%; and the Food and Drug Administration, which ensures the safety of most of what goes into people’s bodies — from baby formula to cancer drugs to hip implants — 21%.

Thousands of these employees were laid off or had their contracts cut, while some took buyouts or retired earlier than anticipated. Divisions have experienced a brain drain of epic proportions, ProPublica found, losing senior leaders behind some of the biggest health initiatives of the modern era, like the rapid rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Many of the cuts contradict what the administration has said about its priorities.

The secretary who has questioned the safety of vaccines has pushed out scores of regulators who work to make vaccines safe. And while he has declared a new era in the fight against chronic disease, he has decimated a center dedicated to that very goal.

Division leaders and staffers told ProPublica the cuts will lead their agencies to neglect their duties: Federal researchers will conduct fewer clinical trials and studies, regulators will conduct fewer or less-thorough inspections of egg farms and foreign drug factories, and public health specialists will be less prepared to combat outbreaks of deadly viruses. With exit and severance packages pending, many former and current workers would only speak anonymously, out of fear of retribution.

HHS did not dispute the findings of ProPublica’s analysis and didn’t directly respond to questions about the consequences of the cuts of thousands of scientists, public health specialists and safety inspectors. HHS also did not respond to our questions about why it wouldn’t share data on workforce reductions. A spokesperson for the department said the idea that Kennedy is weakening public health is “dishonest.”

“Yes, we’ve made cuts — to bloated bureaucracies that were long overdue for accountability,” the spokesperson said in an email. “At the same time, we are working to redirect resources to science that delivers measurable impact, rebuilds public trust, and helps Make America Healthy Again.”

Former health secretary Xavier Becerra, who served under President Joseph Biden until earlier this year, called the cuts reckless.

“Public health isn’t a luxury — it’s a core function of government,” he said. “This hollowing out of expertise could leave us dangerously exposed. It takes years to build a professional workforce with the technical knowledge and public trust these roles require. Once you lose that, it’s not easy to get back.”

REGULATORS LOST

Spotlight: The Food and Drug Administration

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