Around 300 FDA staffers laid off last week are being asked to return. So far, the Trump administration has terminated some 1,000 employees from the agency.
The FDA is planning to bring back some of its recently terminated scientists who were let go last week as part of President Donald Trump’s election pledge to gut the regulatory agency, according to a Sunday report from Reuters.
All in all, the FDA is asking around 300 employees to return, as per Reuters, citing four sources with second-hand knowledge of the matter, though the publication has been unable to independently verify this number. Some of the staff to be rehired are those involved in reviewing Neuralink, Elon Musk’s health-tech company that is testing brain implants.
According to Reuters’ sources, who requested anonymity, the federal agency was to make the requests to return over the weekend. At least 11 staff with the Center for Devices and Radiological Health have already been contacted.
Since his inauguration as president—and since the confirmation of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services—Trump has enacted sweeping job cuts, thinning out the country’s foremost health authorities, including the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.
As per the Reuters article on Sunday, more than 1,000 FDA employees had been let go.
“No one at the moment thinks they have job security,” Stuart Pape, food and drug chair at Polsinelli Law Firm and former associate chief counsel for foods at the FDA, told BioSpace last week. “There’s no question that there’s a concerted effort to reduce the number of government employees, including at places like FDA.”
Indeed, several high-ranking FDA officials departed the agency—even before RFK Jr.’s cuts had begun. In January, for instance, Patrizia Cavazzoni, former director of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, retired. A few weeks earlier, mid-December 2024, Namandjé Bumpus, Principal Deputy Commissioner, also stepped down from her post.
Celia Witten, deputy director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, also left the agency at the end of last week, according to a report from Endpoints News.
In response to the FDA layoffs, some 500 advocates, analysts, doctors and industry players signed an open letter to the Trump administration, expressing concern about the “arbitrary and excessive staffing cuts.” The signatories request not only for the layoffs to stop but also that the FDA be “empowered to continue to perform its critical work.”
The letter, organized by the non-profit group No Patient Left Behind, argues that severely downsizing the FDA “will threaten and delay the approval of new medicines, diagnostics and devices, jeopardize the safety of our food supply and animal products, leave us ill-prepared to address emerging health issues, and risk the safety and quality of everyday products.”
