‘FDA as we've known it is finished': Former commissioner

Former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Robert Califf said the federal agency that he’s known for years “is finished” after mass layoffs began 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 post 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 Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) initiated on Tuesday mass layoffs estimated to impact roughly 10,000 of its employees as part of the reorganization announced last week.

Many staffers at HHS, and the federal agencies it houses, awoke Tuesday morning to notices of their dismissals in their email inboxes.

Sources within HHS told The Associated Press that at least four directors of the 27 institutes in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were put on administrative leave and nearly all communications staff were fired.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the layoffs last week, saying it would be a “painful period for HHS.”

Former HHS staffers, including those who were just laid off, took to social media to decry the layoffs and warned that the functions of HHS offices would suffer as a result.

Another former FDA commissioner, Scott Gottlieb, also lamented the layoffs, saying the FDA was once known to lag behind its European counterparts in medical advances, but, over the past 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 post on X.