Democratic lawmakers are sending Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a letter on Tuesday urging the secretary to reinstate fired HHS and National Institutes of Health employees.
The letter, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin — whose district encompasses the NIH headquarters in Bethesda, Maryland — is co-signed by nine other Democratic representatives and delegates hailing from Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, where hundreds of thousands of federal government employees live and work.
The lawmakers accuse Kennedy of taking part in an “illegal mass firing” that the signatories claim will contribute to an “overall environment of chaos and poor morale” at HHS.
“Without immediate action, the harmful consequences of this outrageous purge will be with us for decades to come as the fired employees are forced to find new careers outside of their chosen field: medical research for the public good,” the letter reads, according to a copy that was first obtained by NOTUS.
Trending
Roughly 5,200 probationary HHS staff — including nearly 1,200 NIH employees — were fired during the February federal workforce cuts under the guidance of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Some of those employees have already been reinstated by Kennedy; he verbally rescinded the layoffs of nearly 950 Indian Health Service workers just hours after they’d received termination emails, saying that “Indians suffer the highest level of chronic disease of any demographic” and Trump wants him to “end the chronic disease epidemic beginning in Indian country.”
But many of the terminations stand, with Democrats claiming in the letter that many of the fired probationary employees are among “the best and brightest young scientists of their generation.”
The exact number of federal probationary employees affected by the cuts so far is unclear, and legal challenges have made it difficult to determine how many terminations will actually happen.
After a federal board overturned the layoffs of probationary employees at six agencies, the National Science Foundation moved to rehire the more than 80 probationary employees the agency had fired. (The NSF did not, however, rehire the roughly 80 part-time experts it had voluntarily laid off at the same time.)
The FDA also moved to rehire some of its fired food safety experts.
A federal judge last week issued a temporary pause on probationary employee firings, saying the terminations were likely unlawful. But thousands of fired HHS staff remain unemployed and in limbo.
The letter from the lawmakers includes testimony from fired health agency employees, including an NIH cancer researcher and an FDA engineer working on medical devices.
“You are now actively pushing them out of public service to our nation,” the lawmakers write to Kennedy.
—
Margaret Manto is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
Author
