Senate Democrats Detail, Protest HHS Layoff Notices

A letter from 30 Senate Democrats to HHS provides the greatest level of detail to date of the layoff notices the department has issued since the start of the shutdown, while opposing the move as “punitive and reckless.”

They wrote that the roughly 1,000 notices—currently on hold, along with notices affecting several thousand employees of other agencies due to a judicial order—include:

• some 600 employees of the CDC “include data scientists and health statisticians, chronic disease experts, and communications personnel who keep states and the public informed about critical health information”;
• more than 100 from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, “gutting the agency responsible for addressing our nation’s mental health care and substance use crises”;
• more than 40 employees from the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, “effectively eliminating entire programs that identify health incidents, determine response needs, and coordinate Federal health care surge operations”;
• nearly 50 from the Administration for Children and Families “who are responsible for reducing poverty, supporting families and vulnerable youth, and evaluating the effectiveness of these programs”;
• 55 employees of the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, “including all staff working to oversee the Title X family planning program.”

The letter also calls the layoffs “poorly planned,” noting that some employees “learned that they were fired not through official notices but through an inability to use their credentials to log into their agency accounts.” The CDC further initially moved to lay off an additional 700 employees but quickly reinstated them, which “follows the pattern of earlier staff reductions where HHS has fired employees only to later reinstate them,” they wrote.

“The Department has yet to justify the RIFs and other staff reductions it implemented earlier this year when the Department fired and forced out 20,000 HHS employees,” they added.

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