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Thousands of employees at the Food and Drug Administration learned by email that they were being let go, but then some were called back to the office.
SILVER SPRING, Md. — Hundreds of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) employees arrived at the agency’s headquarters in White Oak on Tuesday, ready to work, but suddenly learned their world was turned upside-down.
“Many employees who came in at 5 or 6 in the morning discovered when they went to go to their offices to do their work, their badges no longer worked, and security stopped them from entering the building,” revealed Anthony Lee, president of the National Treasury Employee Union and 20-year FDA veteran. “That’s when they were told, ‘check your email, you received what’s known as a RIF notice, a Reduction in Force.’ Essentially they had lost their jobs.”
Lee says after decades with the federal agency, he’d never seen anything like this. But he was more surprised when many of those employees were called back to work, while still being on administrative leave.
“The thought is, if my work is so important that you want to ask me to come back and do it…I never should’ve lost my job in the first place,” Lee said. “Employees received letters with a phone number connected to someone who’s deceased. Employees received letters with someone who was not working in the federal government anymore as a point of contact. Just a lot of inefficiency coming from this RIF process.”
The firings are part of widespread layoffs happening at multiple agencies under the Department of Health and Human Services, such as the CDC and NIH.
Lee also pointed out that no plan was set up for fired employees to pass along what they know.
“There was no thought to these cuts,” Lee said. “Since this was done so abruptly, there was no transfer of skills or ability to do that, to transfer them to anyone else…you can’t fire 3,000 employees from the FDA with the level of interconnectedness in the work that we do, and that not have an impact on the overall work.”
On Tuesday, former FDA Commissioner Robert Califf posted on LinkedIn, writing, “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.”
Montgomery County Councilmember Kristin Mink said she spoke to former FDA employees about the lack of clarity surrounding the layoffs, and called for accountability from the Trump administration.
“If there’s one thing that’s clear, it’s that nothing efficient is happening here,” Mink said. “This cannot possibly be legal, this is obviously ridiculous and there is nothing here that is pre-planned that makes sense in any kind of way that has to do with a government that runs efficiently and effectively.”
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