Wiping Out Federal Health Expertise with Cruelty on Display

Yesterday was a profoundly sad day for people who care about American greatness in health. With a measure of gratuitous cruelty, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services slashed 10,000 jobs, wiping out a stunning breadth of health expertise at FDA, CDC, and NIH.

Robert Califf, an international expert in clinical research and cardiovascular medicine, twice served as FDA Commissioner. Yesterday, he summed up the wreckage at that agency:

“The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed. I believe that history will see this a huge mistake. I will be glad if I’m proven wrong, but even then there is no good reason to treat people this way. It will be interesting to hear from the new leadership how they plan to put ‘Humpty Dumpty’ back together again.”

Cruelty on Display

Wiping out so much health expertise in a single stroke was not the only spectacle of the mass firings yesterday. There was also the spectacle of cruelty in the firings. At multiple worksites, employees stood in line for hours waiting to see if they could enter their workplace. It fell to security guards to tell people they had lost their jobs. Those guards handed tickets to terminated employees with instructions to go home. To retrieve their personal belongings from work at some later time, the ticket told them to call one of a list of ten different phone numbers.

But the coup de grâce was the instruction to some employees who might feel they were victims of discrimination. It was to contact Anita Pinder with their complaints. Pinder died last year.

Public Spirit That Refuses to Die

In the face of this astonishing destruction of resources for public health, the spark of public spirit still shines. Epidemiologist Katelyn Jetelina writes on Substack:

“Public servants don’t do this work for prestige or money. Every one of the thousands who lost their jobs – over the past two months and in the months to come – is motivated by one mission: to serve their communities. We don’t fight for science or agencies, we fight for people, we fight for kids. For the right to survive and the hope to thrive…

“So, even as these systems are dismantled or privatized, the fight for public health continues – with camaraderie, with hope, and with the quiet (and not-so-quiet) resilience of millions of people who will never stop fighting for the public’s well-being.

“That will never change. And it can’t be taken away.”

Click here, here, and here for more about this purge of expertise. For insight on the concerns this raises for American leadership in biotechnology, click here.

Red Blood Cells on an Agar Plate, photograph by Bill Branson for NIH / Wikimedia Commons

Subscribe by email to follow the accumulating evidence and observations that shape our view of health, obesity, and policy.

April 2, 2025