HHS carries out mass firings across health agencies after Supreme Court decision
The firings were originally communicated April 1 for most of the included employees, but they'd been delayed as a legal battle played out. That culminated in a US Supreme Court decision July 8 that, the US Department of Health and Human Services said in the email, means the agency 'is now permitted to move forward with a portion of its [reduction in force].'
HHS eliminated 10,000 employees across agencies including the US Food and Drug Administration, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the US National Institutes of Health in a reorganization announced March 27; some have since gotten their jobs back, but the number losing employment Monday is in the thousands, a spokesperson for the agency confirmed.
Some of those 10,000, though, are protected at least temporarily under a different court case, NY v. Kennedy, and are not being separated immediately, the spokesperson said. That includes employees at six units of the CDC — the National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention; the National Center for Environmental Health; the Division of Reproductive Health; the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health; the Office on Smoking and Health; and the National Center for Birth Defects and Development Disabilities — the Center for Tobacco Products at the FDA; the Office of Head Start; and the Division of Data and Technical Analysis under the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation.
'All employees previously notified on April 1 have been separated, except for those' to whom the temporary restraining order in NY v. Kennedy applies, the HHS spokesperson said.
In that case, a US District Court judge in Rhode Island earlier this month granted a preliminary injunction request from a coalition of 19 states and the District of Columbia to halt the reorganization plan announced March 27.
Last week, in a separate case, the Supreme Court allowed federal agencies to proceed with their reduction-in-force, or RIF, plans, putting on hold a lower court order that had temporarily blocked President Donald Trump from taking those steps without approval from Congress.
But the justices noted that 'we express no view on the legality of any Agency RIF and Reorganization Plan,' leaving open the possibility that it could rule against a specific agency's layoff plan in the future if the reductions appeared to make it impossible for the department to carry out its obligation under the law.
Filed by a coalition of more than a dozen unions, nonprofits and local governments, that case stemmed from an executive order Trump signed in mid-February that kicked off the process of significantly reducing the size of federal agencies.
'HHS previously announced our plans to transform this department to Make America Healthy Again and we intend to do just that,' HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon said in an email to CNN after the Supreme Court's ruling last week.
Meanwhile, the District Court of the Lower District of California is continuing to consider whether the federal agencies can continue to withhold the RIF plans from the court's view. The Trump administration is arguing that the court has 'no basis' to review the legality of the plans.
Earlier Monday, the Supreme Court said Trump could proceed with his plan to carry out mass layoffs at the Department of Education, and within two hours, the department sent notices to employees indicating that it's immediately resuming its plans. The employees were told they would be let go on August 1, while HHS's terminations were nearly immediate.
'You are hereby notified that you are officially separated from HHS at the close of business on July 14, 2025,' read Monday's notice to dismissed HHS employees, according to copies obtained by CNN. 'Thank you for your service to the American people.'
CNN's John Fritze, Devan Cole and Sunlen Serfaty contributed to this report.
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