Kennedy Guts Teams That Share Health Information With the Public

When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services in February, he promised “radical transparency” and declared that “both science and democracy flourish from the free and unimpeded flow of information.”

But when the Trump administration laid off thousands of employees on Tuesday, the targets included the very people who communicated the health department’s work to Americans.

Some of those employees were press officers, but many worked behind the scenes — on social media, newsletters, information campaigns and personal outreach — to translate complicated scientific studies into accessible guidance and to ensure that the recommendations and cutting-edge research produced in the department’s dozens of offices reached the people who needed them.

Their work included publicizing drug and food recalls, explaining the implications of new research and spreading awareness of treatments and preventive measures for diseases, according to seven people laid off from the communications offices of five H.H.S. agencies housed in the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Posts on LinkedIn indicated that the layoffs also hit people who communicated about infectious disease outbreaks.

All seven people who spoke with The New York Times said their offices had lost most or all of their employees. Gillian SteelFisher, a principal research scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, described the situation as “a profound loss for public health, and for the public’s health.”

“Good public health is a partnership with the public,” Dr. SteelFisher added. “It’s about helping people make decisions and take actions that protect them and their loved ones, and to do that, fundamentally, you have to be able to talk to people.”

The layoffs are likely to draw lawsuits, as the administration’s previous mass layoffs have. Opponents, including congressional Democrats, argue that the administration does not have the authority to make such cuts or restructuring decisions without Congress.

Mr. Kennedy has said he wants to centralize communications within H.H.S., and in a video last week, he argued that the existence of “more than 100 communications offices” was an example of unacceptable bureaucracy. “I want to promise you now that we’re going to do more with less,” he said in the video.

When reached for comment on Wednesday, H.H.S. said the cuts had been to “redundant or unnecessary administrative positions” and reiterated the arguments Mr. Kennedy had made in his video. The F.D.A., the N.I.H. and the C.D.C. all directed requests for comment to the H.H.S. line.

Several laid-off employees argued that centralization would compromise the quality of information by sacrificing the subject-matter expertise of longtime communications employees in specific agencies.

“It’s doing a disservice to the public,” said Chanapa Tantibanchachai, who was an F.D.A. spokeswoman until she was laid off on Tuesday. She said the agency’s entire press office had been laid off. “It’s not in service of ‘radical transparency’ like Secretary Kennedy says,” she added. “It’s the complete opposite.”

Laid-off employees said they did not believe their work could be replicated with the same quality by a centralized office.

Alex Saint, who was a communications specialist in the F.D.A. Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, recalled that in 2022, the F.D.A. learned that cough syrup contaminated with diethylene glycol was killing children in Gambia. Agency experts feared that even if the tainted component hadn’t reached U.S. drug manufacturers, parents unable to find cough and cold medication amid a shortage would order it from other countries.

Her office communicated with U.S. manufacturers on testing protocols, put emergency rooms on alert for symptoms of diethylene glycol poisoning and urged parents not to buy medicine from overseas. The tainted medicine did not reach the United States. Whether or not those actions prevented a domestic crisis, Ms. Saint said they were essential.

She said it was not clear who would perform those services now.

“There was no transition plan,” she said.

Dustin Hays, who was laid off as chief of science communications at the National Eye Institute, an N.I.H. division that works to prevent vision loss, said he worried that as a result of the cuts, clinicians might not learn about new research, and policymakers might cut funding for emerging science because they didn’t understand its value.

“I think this is an egregious misstep by the government, and I don’t think they’re even realizing how long it takes to build an enterprise like N.I.H.,” Mr. Hays said.

Drew Altman, the president of KFF, a nonprofit health research group, noted that the Trump administration was drastically narrowing the federal government’s role in public health while also cutting funding to state governments. Dr. SteelFisher was similarly concerned about the effects at the state level.

“Now, the risk is that we have every state kind of reinventing the wheel,” Dr. SteelFisher said. “And the hard reality is that some states will probably go without wheels.”