Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Robert Califf said the federal agency that he’s identified for years “is finished” after mass layoffs started Tuesday morning.
“The FDA as we’ve known it is finished, with most of the leaders with institutional knowledge and a deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed,” Califf wrote in a put up on LinkedIn, saying he’s been “overwhelmed with messages about the firings” this morning.
“I believe that history will see this a huge mistake,” he continued. “I will be glad if I’m proven wrong, but even then there is no good reason to treat people this way.”
“It will be interesting to hear from the new leadership how they plan to put ‘Humpty Dumpty’ back together again,” he added.
The Division of Well being and Human Providers (HHS) initiated on Tuesday mass layoffs estimated to influence roughly 10,000 of its staff as a part of the reorganization introduced final week.
Many staffers at HHS, and the federal companies it homes, awoke Tuesday morning to notices of their dismissals of their e-mail inboxes.
Sources inside HHS advised The Related Press that at the least 4 administrators of the 27 institutes within the Nationwide Institutes of Well being (NIH) had been placed on administrative depart and almost all communications employees had been fired.
HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. introduced the layoffs final week, saying it will be a “painful period for HHS.”
Former HHS staffers, together with those that had been simply laid off, took to social media to decry the layoffs and warned that the features of HHS places of work would undergo consequently.
One other former FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, additionally lamented the layoffs, saying the FDA was as soon as identified to lag behind its European counterparts in medical advances, however, over the previous 25 years, “we built the FDA into the most efficient, forward-leaning drug regulatory agency in the world—and established the U.S. as the global center of biopharmaceutical innovation.”
“Today, the cumulative barrage on that drug-discovery enterprise, threatens to swiftly bring back those frustrating delays for American consumers, particularly affecting rare diseases and areas of significant unmet medical need,” Gottlieb added, in a put up on X.
