21% of FDA Staff Gone: Analysis
A deeply-reported “groundbreaking” ProPublica analysis of HHS workplace statistics finds that 21% of FDA staff have left the agency, either through reductions in force or voluntary retirements and resignations. The report says HHS did not dispute its analysis and its conclusion that over 20,500 HHS employees are no longer with the department as of 8/16.
ProPublica says that total is an undercount since it does not include the hundreds or even thousands of workers who have received layoff notices and remain on administrative leave.
It says the massive cuts “have left departments stretching to perform their basic functions,” according to interviews with more than three dozen former and current employees.
“Yes, we’ve made cuts,” an HHS spokesperson told the journalism organization, “to bloated bureaucracies that were long overdue for accountability. 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.”
Looking specifically at FDA, ProPublica says that while HHS had said that safety inspectors and reviewers would be spared from the cuts, the agency has lost more than 400 workers who supported inspections. More than 240 consumer safety specialists have left across the agency, it says, including nearly 40 workers responsible for safeguarding food and about 250 chemists, biologists, and toxicologists.
The report says FDA has lost over 900 scientists and health experts since January, and over 500 regulators, investigators, and compliance workers.
“Many of the investigators who left had honed their skills over years of field visits and inspections, developing a sixth sense for possible violations,” ProPublica says. ‘I could walk into a plant and within five minutes could tell you if there was a rodent problem,’ said a former division director at the investigations office who left FDA after inspecting countless facilities over more than two decades. ‘Once you’ve been in a hot warehouse and you smell rodent urine, it’s like fresh-cut grass, you know exactly what it is the minute you smell it.’
The report quotes former FDA associate commissioner Peter Lurie, now the president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, as saying that such drastic cuts will hamper the agency’s ability to recruit future inspectors and scientists.
“The big attraction of federal employment has always been its stability and its benefits, and we’re at the point that the stability is undermined,” said Lurie. “This is a set of cuts that is going to hamstring FDA for a decade or more.”
ProPublica says that CBER has lost about 500 people, about 26% of its workforce. It notes that during the Covid-19 pandemic, CBER was crucial in ensuring the quick rollout of safe and effective vaccines. “The Center was already somewhat understaffed for the workload,” said former director Peter Marks, who led CBER from 2016 to 2025. “Now with these cuts, particularly cuts of the most experienced individuals who have left for various reasons, the agency, and in particular the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, is just a shadow of its former self.”
The report says that Marks, who helped launch Operation Warp Speed in the first Trump administration, which rapidly developed and approved Covid vaccines, resigned under pressure in March, citing an “unprecedented assault on scientific truth.” HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has long been a fierce critic of vaccines, has used his position to further create doubt about vaccines, ProPublica says, despite decades of evidence of their safety and efficacy.
Two of CBER’s top cell and gene therapy officials were placed on leave over the summer. The report says HHS did not respond to questions about the high-profile exits, but it has previously suggested the gene therapy officials weren’t aligned with the administration’s goals, and said that Marks had no place at the agency if he did not support “restoring science to its golden standard.”
As civil servants have departed the Center, political appointees have gained a foothold, according to ProPublica. Under the leadership of Vinay Prasad, whom the administration brought in to lead CBER in May, the Center “was run as a political organization,” said Marks. “Decisions were not being made on science, nor were they even being made on articulated policy. They were being made essentially on an arbitrary basis.” The New York Times reported that Prasad overruled his Center’s experts on the ongoing use of Covid vaccines, recommending restricting the shots. Prasad did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions, it says.
Just a few weeks after his arrival, Prasad resigned under pressure from conservative rabble-rouser and [President Donald J.] Trump-whisperer Laura Loomer, but then was asked to return by Kennedy and FDA commissioner Martin Makary, leading Loomer to say she would be taking a much more detailed look at FDA and identifying staffers who do not support Trump’s agenda and policies.
A spokesperson for HHS said in an email that Kennedy was not anti-vaccine and that the agency would continue to regulate immunizations. “FDA remains steadfast in enforcing rigorous vaccine oversight, ensuring the highest standards of safety and protection for all Americans,” said the spokesperson, adding that Kennedy was “pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability.”
Meanwhile, the report says, “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 mosquitoes.”