Fired FDA communications staff worry about impact on public health

WASHINGTON – Vera Rosenthal, a health communications specialist at the Food and Drug Administration, woke up to an email April 1 informing her that she had been affected by the Trump administration’s “Reduction in Force” effort and no longer had a job at the agency.

About a half hour later, she got out of bed to take her border collie mix, Pepper, for a walk.

“By the time I came back from walking her, I was numb,” she said. “The tears were gone, but I just became numb.”

Rosenthal was one of thousands of employees across the Department of Health and Human Services whose positions were cut as part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s effort to drastically cut the size of the federal government under the premise that it will save taxpayer money.

In interviews, three former health communications specialists whose positions were terminated said they’re concerned about the impact on the agency.

Their jobs were to get the message out about key health issues, be it by sharing information about contaminated medicines, informing the public on drug shortages and spreading the word about fraudulent health products.

Rosenthal started at the FDA in 2020, and initially focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. More recently, she has largely focused on compounding of the popular GLP-1 medications for diabetes and obesity, which have seen shortages in recent months because of high demand.

Rosenthal also worked on health fraud cases, which she said is particularly an issue with supplements that contain active ingredients that would require them to go through a drug approval process.

“The thing that really is never going to be able to be known is when research isn’t funded and we can’t tell people about things… how many lives we could have saved,” she said.

User fee funded

The employees’ positions were funded by user fees that industry pays to the FDA in exchange for product reviews. Their salaries did not come from funds appropriated by Congress.

One former communications employee who asked not to be named or identified by gender, said that they did not expect their position to be cut because it wasn’t funded by taxpayer dollars. They thought that if user fee-funded positions were to be cut, that the pharmaceutical industry would speak out about it.

The employee was previously working to update communication for a risk evaluation and mitigation strategy.

Now they don’t know whether the work will be completed.

As of late Thursday, they hadn’t been asked to come back to their position. But even if they had received such an offer, they said they wouldn’t take it.

Alex Saint, a health communications specialist at the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, said she had a feeling that the firings were coming after seeing the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on it in late March.

Still, she said she was caught off guard when she got an email on April 1 at 5:14 a.m. that her position had been eliminated.

Everyone in her roughly 25-person team working on health communications lost their job.

Saint’s team was responsible for messaging about public health issues. Saint herself worked on a strategic plan in 2022 to prevent people from using batches of cough syrup that had been contaminated with antifreeze.

At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, her colleagues worked to curb adverse event reports of people inadvertently drinking makeshift hand sanitizer that came in containers people confused with drink pouches.

Much of her job consisted of finding the right messengers for the information, which comes from well-established relationships with partners like hospitals and physician groups that she says can’t be easily replaced.

The former employee who asked not to be named said that it took some time to get acquainted with the FDA’s processes around drugs, including generic drugs. They often turned to FDA’s policy staff — which were also affected by staffing cuts — to aid in their understanding.

“It’s not just the skills we have as comms people, it’s the institutional knowledge,” the employee said. “And that’s all gone.”

‘Quiet fired’

Even before the firings began, Saint said there was a shift in how the agency’s communications operated after the Trump administration began.

She said previously the centers themselves could run their own communications through channels like social media posts and email listservs, but after the inauguration, they had to get approval from HHS.

At one point, she heard it was taking up to 45 days to review some non-time sensitive communications, like annual reports.

“You’ve heard the term quiet quitting? It kind of felt like the communications at FDA were quiet fired,” she said.

Rosenthal said that FDA employees felt a drop in morale after the Trump administration took over and murmurings of large-scale firings began.

“There was an immediate demoralization,” she said. “But there was never any point where I thought I it was hopeless in terms of I stopped working as hard, or I did things differently.”

All three employees said that they’d like to see more action from Congress on both sides of the aisle to respond to the cuts.

While House Energy and Commerce Committee staff will be briefed by HHS staff on the cuts Friday afternoon, it’s not clear if or when HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might appear before Congress to testify.

A group of Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee appeared outside HHS on April 9 to lay out their demands from Kennedy for a meeting with them and an appearance before the committee.

The Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee had asked Kennedy to testify before the panel on April 10, but the hearing did not happen.

Rosenthal said that the lack of details is ironic, given Kennedy’s previous comments that he plans to make HHS “radically transparent.”

“There is no radical transparency, there is absolutely no transparency at all,” Rosenthal said.

She said given the importance of her role at the FDA, she wouldn’t rule out that she would consider returning if asked. She said she “loved” her job, including working with her teammates and going into the office.

The former employee who asked not to be named said the actions to cut staff at the agency seem to go against what FDA Commissioner Marty Makary has said about making drug development more efficient.

“Those things clash,” the former employee said. “Because you’re handicapping your staff’s ability to advise industry on what they could do and what they need to do to get drugs developed more efficiently.”

Saint’s message to Congress was a warning that she and others at the FDA aren’t sure that the FDA is equipped to respond to emerging health threats.

“Do they have confidence that the FDA, as it stands now, will still keep their constituents safe?” she asked.

“Because, from the perspective of people who were at FDA, we don’t know that it could.”