Thousands of employees across HHS were terminated Monday evening after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled last week that the Trump administration could move forward with its sweeping reorganization of the agency.
The Department of Health and Human Services has started formally laying off thousands of staffers, setting in motion Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s sweeping reorganization of the agency.
According to a report from CNN, employees received their formal termination notices via email Monday evening. “You are hereby notified that you are officially separated from HHS at the close of business on July 14, 2025,” the email read.
A spokesperson for HHS confirmed this move to CNN, noting that the layoffs will apply to as many as 10,000 HHS employees who had been previously informed of their firing in April, but excludes those who have been rehired and those who are covered by an injunction issued by a Rhode Island court earlier this month.
An HHS spokesperson also confirmed the layoffs to BioSpace in an email.
Kennedy unveiled plans in March to put some 10,000 jobs across the agency on the chopping block. The FDA—a subdivision of HHS which the Secretary has criticized for being a “sock puppet” to the pharma industry—would suffer the heaviest blow, with 3,500 roles put at risk. Under Kennedy’s restructuring scheme, the CDC would lose 2,400 employees, while 1,200 jobs at the NIH would be eliminated.
Kennedy’s plan was met with a slew of lawsuits seeking to block the layoffs. In May, for instance, a coalition of unions, employee groups and local governments sued HHS to stop the action and won, with a California judge writing that “agencies may not conduct large-scale reorganizations and reductions in force in blatant disregard of Congress’s mandates.”
That ruling was overturned last week, however, when the U.S. Supreme Court found that the government is “likely to succeed” in arguing that its overhaul of HHS is “lawful.” HHS pointed to this ruling in its termination emails to its employees, noting that the agency “is now permitted to move forward with a portion” of its reduction-in-force initiative.
Other lawsuits are still winding their way through the courts. The case in Rhode Island has allowed some HHS staffers to keep their jobs, at least for now. That case was brought in May by 19 states plus the District of Columbia, which called the restructuring program “unconstitutional and illegal.”
As in the case of the California court, Rhode Island judge Melissa DuBose said in her ruling that “the executive branch does not have the authority to order, organize, or implement wholesale changes to the structure and function of the agencies created by Congress.”
Update (July 15): This story has been updated with a confirmation of the layoffs to BioSpace from an HHS spokesperson.
