The axe started falling a few days after Marty Makary was sworn in as President Donald Trump’s FDA commissioner. The first to go at the Food and Drug Administration was top vaccine official Peter Marks on Monday – but that was just the beginning.
In every corner of the FDA, and at sister health agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, thousands of workers, specialists, and scientists were slapped with DOGE pink slips Tuesday morning.
A top scientist on the FDA’s bird flu response team – gone.
The leader of Makary’s tobacco unit – gone.
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Staffers who had been considered essential to ensuring the safety of medicines, food and medical devices used by Americans – gone.
“No segment of FDA is untouched,” said Dr. Robert Califf, Makary’s predecessor. “No one knows what the plan is.”
The HHS 10,000
The layoffs were part of an effort by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to cut his department’s headcount by 10,000 in line with Trump and Elon Musk’s mission to pare the federal government.
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HHS employee Julie Siegel was denied access, and her badge was taken away outside the Mary E. Switzer Memorial Building, after Trump administration fired staff at the CDC and FDA, part of a plan to cut 10,000 HHS jobs, in Washington, D.C., April 1, 2025.
“Vast swathes of people who knew policy and operations are gone,” said Califf, who served as FDA commissioner in the Obama and Biden administrations. “The US has been the envy of the world in medical product innovation. I don’t know how we maintain that.”
Americans are likely to feel the impact of the FDA cuts though slower approval of new medications, fewer food safety inspections, and lapses in new medical products, experts said.
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DOGE engineers ‘on the loose’
The FDA layoffs “will not affect drug, medical device, or food reviewers, nor will it impact inspectors,” a Health and Human Services fact-sheet on the layoffs said.
But several former FDA officials said that, as in the case of earlier DOGE layoffs across the government, the Musk team apparently didn’t take the time to understand the importance of the roles they were cutting – threatening safety inspections, reviews of new medication, and research.
More: Dr. Peter Marks, top vaccine official at FDA, resigns and criticizes RFK Jr.
Elon Musk displays a chainsaw given to him by Argentine President Javier Milei during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Washington, D.C., on Feb. 20, 2025.
The firings are what happens “when you turn software engineers loose on a problem without content expertise,” Califf said.
In this case, whoever drew up the list of those to be fired at FDA either didn’t understand or didn’t care about the role support staff play for scientists reviewing new medications or inspectors looking for unsanitary conditions at food plants, the former officials said.
White House spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said the cuts across HHS were Kennedy’s call. “The president has given the responsibility to his Cabinet secretaries to hire and fire at their respective agencies,” she told reporters.
Who’s essential?
By laying off specialists, logisticians and other staff, the Trump administration has made FDA reviewers and inspectors slower and less effective in keeping Americans safe and healthy, the former officials said. The FDA didn’t return messages seeking comment.
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Martin Makary testifies before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions hearings on his nomination to be Food and Drugs Administration (FDA) Commissioner, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, on March 6, 2025.
“Reviewers and inspectors are dependent on a wide network of people,” many of whom were fired, Califf said. “It feels like there’s no one with content knowledge at the helm.”
A former official noted that FDA had roughly 1,500 people in the field for an average of 8,300 domestic and 900 foreign food production inspections each year. But only 450 of those personnel are inspectors – the rest are support staff.
Whose fingerprints?
Makary, a surgeon and public policy expert, was quietly sworn in as FDA commissioner last week, Politico reported, and he pushed out vaccine official Marks on Monday.
But Tuesday’s firings, which appeared to number at least 1,500 at the FDA, were the work of the White House Office of Management and Budget and Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, according to the former top FDA official.
The former official, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution from the Trump administration, said Makary and his boss Kennedy had little say in the firings.
Kennedy takes heat
In a statement released Tuesday, Kennedy praised Makary as “a national leader in medicine with impeccable credentials.”
Without criticizing Makary, four former FDA officials – all of whom acknowledged the need to streamline some operations – took Kennedy to task for allowing the shakeup of Health and Human Services without a blueprint for what comes next.
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Kennedy, who rose to prominence spreading vaccine misinformation and other conspiracy theories, has said his Make America Healthy Again program will save Americans from a epidemic of chronic illness, while maintaining a public skepticism of much medical science.
“He’s talking about cod liver oil and vitamin A,” Califf said. “How far is this going to go?”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Mass firings hit RFK Jr’s health agencies. What happens next?
