More employees at the National Institutes of Health are expected to be laid off in the coming days, multiple federal officials say, less than a week after an initial wave of cuts gutted many offices within the health research agency.
The NIH was initially supposed to lose about 1,200 scientists, support staff and other officials as a result of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s restructuring. It is unclear how many additional employees will be targeted for cuts.
A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services did not provide a response when asked why the additional cuts were occurring.
In a statement, a department official said that HHS is doing its reorganization “in phases,” following the layoffs of roughly 10,000 employees who were notified Tuesday that they were cut.
“The Department is now detailing the structure of each redefined division to streamline operations, enhance responsiveness to the American people, and ultimately improve the nation’s health as part of the Make America Healthy Again initiative,” the official said.
NIH officials said they have been bracing for a second wave of cuts after a handful of employees never received reduction-in-force notices despite the entire rest of their teams being cut during the initial wave of letters Tuesday.
But at least some of the layoff notices to come at the NIH are expected to be sent to staff that were not initially listed to be cut, two NIH officials said they were told.
Additional staff need to be cut from the agency’s workforce to compensate for others whose layoffs had to be reversed, one NIH source said. It is unclear how many people have been reinstated.
In some of the other health agencies in the department, three federal health officials said they had been told by leaders not to expect additional cuts within their teams.
But hundreds of additional cuts are also expected in the department, two HHS officials said, following the completion of consolidation and mergers laid out by Kennedy’s team.
The additional layoffs come as the department’s leadership has also faced calls to reverse some of the steep cuts, which left remaining federal health officials scrambling to address abrupt disruptions to bird flu testing, food and drug safety inspections, labs investigating outbreaks and worker safety research.
Kennedy suggested Thursday that a fifth of the layoffs he planned with Elon Musk’s DOGE task force may have been mistakes, and could be reinstated.
Some federal health agencies have already asked laid-off workers to come back to the job for a few more weeks, two federal health officials said, instead of going on leave.
