Health and Human Services employees were offered voluntary buyouts to resign from their jobs on Friday night, according to a person who received the email and an administration official.
The agency’s approximately 80,000 employees received an unsigned email Friday night offering them a “voluntary separation incentive payment,” with a deadline to respond set for Friday, March 14.
The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In February, during an interview on Fox News’ “Ingraham Angle,” Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he had a “generic list” of staffers at the department he’d like to see removed.
“If you’ve been involved in good science, you have got nothing to worry about,” Kennedy said. “If you care about public health, you’ve got nothing to worry about. If you’re in there working for the pharmaceutical industry, then I’d say you should move out and work for the pharmaceutical industry.”
HHS oversees the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which provides health insurance coverage for a significant portion of the U.S. population. The agency also oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which underwent substantial cuts to its workforce last month.
Experts have warned that cuts at HHS could hamstring Kennedy’s ability to push forward his own priorities, including making changes to vaccine policies and eliminating unhealthy foods.
“Cutting staff is one challenge Mr. Kennedy will face,” Dorit Reiss, a vaccine policy expert at the University of California, San Francisco, said after his Senate confirmation last month. “That challenge will be exacerbated by his lack of expertise about the department’s general functions, something in which an expert staff could help him with.”
The Health and Human Services separation offer comes as Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency work to drastically reduce the size of the federal workforce through widespread layoffs, the dismantling of entire agencies and substantial cuts to federal programs and grants.
The move comes after President Donald Trump clarified in a Cabinet meeting this week that agency heads — not Musk — are in charge of staffing decisions.
Trump, however, warned his Cabinet secretaries that if they don’t sufficiently cut staffing in their departments, Musk would intervene.
“If they can cut, it’s better. If they don’t cut, then Elon will do the cutting,” Trump said Thursday.
The Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment Authority, also known as the buyout authority, allows agencies that are downsizing or restructuring to offer employees lump-sum payments of up to $25,000 as an incentive to voluntarily separate.
The Trump administration in January similarly offered roughly 2 million federal workers voluntary buyouts, an offer the White House later said roughly 75,000 people accepted.
Berkeley Lovelace Jr. contributed.
