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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced Thursday that it plans to eliminate approximately 3,500 positions at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), even as the agency’s staff is reportedly struggling to meet product review deadlines.
The layoffs are part of a broader workforce reduction at HHS, which will cut 10,000 full-time employees across multiple agencies. That figure is in addition to the roughly 10,000 employees who have left since President Trump took office, many through voluntary separation programs.
In total, HHS said the downsizing will shrink its workforce from 82,000 to 62,000 employees and save $1.8 billion annually.
As part of the restructuring, the department is consolidating 28 divisions into 15, and its 10 regional offices will be reduced to five.
The reorganization will also create a new agency, the Administration for a Healthy America (AHA), which will absorb various offices and departments to better coordinate chronic care and disease prevention programs.
“We’re going to eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments and agencies while preserving their core function,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said in a video posted Thursday on X.
The announcement came on the same day that Reuters, citing unnamed sources, reported that FDA staff responsible for reviewing medical devices and tobacco products have been struggling to meet congressionally mandated deadlines, a challenge exacerbated by previous layoffs during the Trump administration.
Last month, the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) laid off around 1,000 probationary employees from the FDA. The cuts mainly affected staff at the agency’s centers for tobacco, food, and medical devices, though some workers were eventually rehired.
Two FDA scientists told Reuters (TRI) that their workloads had effectively doubled since their colleagues were let go, with each now assigned twice the number of new product applications to review.
The FDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.