Medical fallout: RFK Jr. is dismantling American healthcare

The entire team working on the National Survey on Drug Use — the primary source of data on substance abuse in the United States — was dismissed. Also cut were all staff from the Health Department’s Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which annually allocated billions of dollars to help low-income Americans pay their heating bills.

About 700 people were laid off from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), including chemists, physicians, and robotics experts who were directly involved in inspecting medical devices. FDA laboratories in San Francisco, San Juan, Detroit, and Chicago that tested the safety of food, drugs, and cosmetics were shut down. Staff at other research centers were banned from using departmental credit cards to purchase supplies for testing.

FDA committees that had helped uncover a deadly bacteria at an Abbott Nutrition infant formula plant — shut down in 2022 — as well as listeria-causing pathogens at a Boar’s Head facility in 2024, were disbanded. Only 433 inspectors remain at the FDA — out of the 2,000 required. Those remaining are now responsible for overseeing 36,000 food production facilities.

Due to the mass layoffs, hotlines for reporting unsafe food and cosmetics have been suspended, as have counseling services for women with postpartum depression and for those trying to quit smoking.

FDA Chief Medical Officer Hilary Marston and Director of the Office of New Drugs Peter Stein were placed on involuntary leave. Julia Tierney lost her position as acting head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, a role she took on after the forced departure of its former director, Peter Marks.

During Trump’s first term, Marks was one of the key figures in Operation Warp Speed — the initiative to accelerate the development of coronavirus vaccines. In his resignation letter, Marks wrote that he had been willing to work with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but “it became clear that the Secretary has no need for truth or transparency — he seeks only fawning validation of his misinformation and lies.” In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Marks commented on the layoffs at the department:

“They took the place apart without having an instruction manual of how to put it back together.”

At the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, nearly the entire administrative staff and leadership were laid off, including the agency’s top veterinary expert, Tristan Colonius. He had overseen efforts to combat the spread of avian flu and led vaccine development against the disease. The cuts also affected the Veterinary Laboratory Investigation and Response Network, which monitors for viruses in food and animal feed. Although the scientific staff remained, their work ground to a halt without administrative support.

Major layoffs also hit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The Center for Birth Defects was dismantled, retaining only programs that monitor autism and maternal and child health. The National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STDs, and TB Prevention lost about a quarter of its staff, with the HIV division facing the deepest cuts — half of its personnel were dismissed.

A wave of dismissals swept through the leadership of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which conducts medical research. The heads of at least five of the NIH’s 27 institutes lost their positions.

After facing media criticism, Kennedy Jr. acknowledged that around 20% of the layoffs were made in error and promised to reinstate those employees who had been wrongly dismissed. However, ministry sources say the leadership is unlikely to follow through: some staff were reinstated only temporarily, with notice of an impending re-dismissal by summer, while others could not be brought back due to cuts in HR departments.