Firing of thousands of health agency employees will undermine food safety

— OPINION —

The cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services today make a mockery of the “Make America Healthy Again” slogan by arbitrarily decimating new staff in key public health agencies who might actually implement the slogan.  

The firings impact staff across HHS and affect thousands of people on “probationary” status.  

The mass firings will undermine the work of two of the agencies that solve and prevent foodborne outbreaks, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. Cuts to the teams that investigate outbreaks could mean more outbreaks going unsolved in the coming months. 

Eliminating probationary staff in a widespread purge will make it harder to recruit qualified staff to fill the roles moving forward. Many candidates with high qualifications will likely opt not to work for a new boss whose vision for progress includes the arbitrary mass elimination of new employees. 

The FDA has struggled in recent years to recruit and retain qualified staff with expertise in topics like infant nutrition, where specialized training may be critical to make policy decisions affecting millions of Americans. Congress tried to address this gap by granting new hiring authority to FDA’s foods program as part of the FY23 Food and Drug Omnibus Reform Act, which was passed in the wake of a nationwide shortage of infant formula tied to a deadly outbreak. Now, new employees brought in recently could be subject to cuts, impacting current teams and making it harder to recruit moving forward. 

Long-term cuts to FDA staffing levels could have a domino effect on FDA user-fee funding. Currently about 45 percent of FDA’s budget comes from industry user fees. Provisions in the user fee reauthorization statutes require these fees to be refunded if Congress reduces appropriated dollars of user-fee funded programs below a specified annual target. This means that any effort to reduce FDA’s budget could have cascading consequences for the agency’s budget moving forward, further devastating the agency charged with overseeing the safety of our food and effectiveness and safety of healthcare products. 

About the author: Dr. Lurie was Associate Commissioner for Public Health Strategy and Analysis at FDA from 2014-2017.