On Apr. 1, 2025, layoff notices began arriving for thousands of employees of the sprawling U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and its subsidiary agencies, with as many 10,000 workers potentially expected to be hit by the cuts, including some of the country’s top health officials.

The range of job losses across institutes and offices reflected the breadth of what HHS does and the role it plays in the U.S., in both the obvious ways and less appreciated ones.

The cuts and reorganizations affected people who help approve new medicines, track emerging pathogens, and uncover the secrets held in our DNA. But they also reached those developing safer tobacco policies, trying to reduce injuries, and protecting people who rely on Medicare and Medicaid — as well as the staff who made the agencies operate day to day and aimed to communicate health updates, new recommendations, and policy shifts to the public.

For those staff, Tuesday morning extended the uncertainty they had been dealing with since the Trump administration took office with plans to drastically cut the federal workforce. Emails went out to affected employees around 5 a.m., but some who hadn’t seen the messages showed up to work only to be turned away, realizing they had lost their jobs because their badges weren’t working, multiple sources told STAT.

At the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) campus in Silver Spring, Md., security guards instructed fired employees to wait in a line so they could later clean out their offices.