Most of the 80,000 federal workers responsible for Medicare and Medicaid management under the auspices of the Department of Disease Research, Food Testing, and Health and Human Services have been emailed offers to quit their jobs with a $25,000 payment as part of President Donald Trump’s government cuts.
Workers cannot begin until Monday and will not submit responses to so-called voluntary segregation offers until 5pm on Friday. The email was sent to staff across the department, including the National Institutes of Health and the National Institutes of Health, as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, and the Food and Drug Administration in Maryland.
The massive emails went out to “a wide population of HHS employees” and landed in our inbox just days before the head of the agency offered plans to reduce the workforce. HHS is one of the government’s most expensive federal agencies, with an annual budget of around $1.7 trillion, and is primarily medically registered with health insurance.
The agency oversees health insurance in about half of the countries through Medicare for the elderly, through Medicaid for disabled and poor Americans.
There were no immediate comments from HHS on Sunday.
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Trump’s Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., suggests the plan with a deep cut in staff. Last year he pledged to quickly clean up the 600 employees of NIH, the country’s biomedical research division. He hasn’t been that much, but in an interview last month, shortly after he was sworn in last month, Kennedy said he wanted to take some workers out of public health agencies.
“I have a list in my head,” Kennedy said of a potential layoff at the agency. He said some workers “had made a really bad decision” about nutrition guidelines.
The Trump administration is trying to drive federal workers out to cut costs with the help of billionaire Elon Musk. In January, most federal employees received a postponed resignation offer following eight months of pay. Thousands of probation employees were also fired from federal agencies, including HHS.
The latest move to reduce the number of federal health workers is as the CDC is supporting the fatal measles outbreak in West Texas and New Mexico, and lawmakers are debating the deep reductions to Medicaid in federal budgets.
HHS workers will be led by email to contact the local HR office to submit for voluntary separation.
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