Politics
‘This isn’t how a RIF is supposed to work:’ HHS reinstates some laid-off employees, gives them extra work
The Department of Health and Human Services is gradually reinstating some of the staff laid off last month, but the partial reinstatements are still causing uncertainty among HHS employees.
About 10,000 HHS employees were removed in a reduction in force (RIF) on April 1. Another 10,000 employees voluntarily left the agency through the deferred resignation program, early retirement offers or incentive payments worth up to $25,000. The workforce reductions across HHS totaled about 25%, but some of the initial layoffs are now being walked back.
At the National Institutes of Health, a human resources employee said she is among 150 HR staff members being reinstated to process the paperwork of the many employees separating from the agency. NIH fired about 1,200 of its employees on April 1. The NIH HR employee received her reinstatement email on May 20.
“You previously received a notice regarding the Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) upcoming reduction in force (RIF),” an NIH email, obtained by Federal News Network, states. “That notice is hereby revoked. You will not be affected by the upcoming RIF.”
At the same time, a court-ordered preliminary injunction issued Thursday may change the status of many more federal employees who have been impacted by agency RIFs. A U.S. District Court judge in San Francisco has once again found that the Trump administration violated separation of powers principles with its restructuring orders.
The injunction requires agencies to reverse any RIF notices they have already begun or conducted under an executive order from President Donald Trump. But the court order still allows agencies to pause “retrospective” steps while the case is being appealed.
But at HHS, prior to the court order, another 60 recently fired acquisition employees working in the office of the HHS chief information officer (OCIO) were already reinstated and told to return to work “immediately.”
One reinstated OCIO employee said the May 21 email, titled “Rescission of Previous Notice of Reduction in Force,” went to her junk mail folder. After reading it, the employee called her supervisor to verify its authenticity.
“I reached out to my supervisor. I immediately got out my phone. I was like, ‘Is this real?’ She said, ‘Yes, it is, they called back our group,’” the employee told Federal News Network.
In a virtual meeting with the new OCIO leadership team, reinstated employees were told they can temporarily work from home if they need to make child care arrangements or deal with other personal matters before coming back to the office.
“People have had to put off medical procedures. People have taken their children out of child care because they were trying to just save their money, because they didn’t know if they were going to find a job soon,” the OCIO employee said.
Reinstated HHS employees are expected to take on some of the duties of employees who aren’t being brought back.
“They were saying we were being brought back because of the good work we do,” the OCIO employee said. “None of our project managers are coming back, and they expect us to now serve in a project management role. Most of us are not subject matter experts.”
The OCIO employee, who has worked for the federal government for nearly 20 years, said her acquisition team purchases IT equipment for HHS and manages software licenses — some of which are critical to issuing HHS grant funds.
“It’s not simple when you can’t open your Adobe or Salesforce, or any of the systems we use just to turn our computers on every day,” the employee said. “You disable the entire system when you don’t have these licenses or software in place. And it’s not an easy feat to do it. These things take time, they take a lot of negotiating, they take the expertise of our IT professionals, our subject matter experts, who definitely should be called back but are not being called back.”
Many HHS employees found out they were laid off last month when their Personal Identity Verification (PIV) cards were deactivated and no longer enabled them to enter their offices. The OCIO employee said many of her coworkers left their laptops at the office after getting their RIF notices. It’s not entirely clear how many reinstated HHS employees have working PIV cards or laptops that would allow them to get back to work.
“If your card works, you can work from home. If you can make it into the office and your card is active, you are expected to work immediately. They didn’t give us a day. They just said effective immediately,” the employee said.
The OCIO employee said she’s not convinced that HHS will keep reinstated employees around for the long term, and said her firing and reinstatement feels like a “mind game that they’re playing with us.”
“I have no issue with a reduction in force. I’ve seen it done before, and I have no problem with that, but if you do it the right way, it takes months, sometimes a year, to do a study. The risk plans are very transparent. People know where they’re going. There are workshops with HR, there are resume-writing workshops. There are so many things in place when they’re going to RIF someone, and they did none of that,” the employee said.
At NIOSH, ‘the future is in question’ with only a third of its employees
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) was another target in the mass layoffs at HHS in early April. The HHS component, which focuses on workplace safety and health standards, lost about 90% of its approximately 1,200-employee workforce in the RIF last month.
But after significant pressure from unions and lawmakers, HHS partially reversed course last week and reinstated 328 of the employees it had previously fired. The reinstatements brought back NIOSH employees working in coal mining research programs in Ohio and West Virginia, as well as employees working in the agency’s World Trade Center Health Program, which supports 9/11 first responders.
During a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on Tuesday, Chairwoman Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said she was “pleased” with the agency’s partial reversal of the RIF at NIOSH, but that more should be done to bring back employees.
“While your action last week was a good step, there are still other divisions within NIOSH with specialized staff who conduct essential, unique work,” Capito told HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during the hearing. “I support the President’s vision to right-size our government, but … I don’t think eliminating NIOSH programs will accomplish that goal.”
NIOSH employees, represented by the American Federation of Government Employees, traveled to Washington, D.C., from across the country to meet with lawmakers this week and hold a rally outside HHS headquarters, urging the remainder of their colleagues to be brought back on the job.
Catherine Blackwood, a postdoctoral fellow who has been working at NIOSH as an immunotoxicology at NIOSH’s Morgantown, West Virginia, campus since 2021, said public-facing programs have been “brought back to a certain level,” but are still not running at their full capability.
“We are really pushing to reinstate the entirety of NIOSH, because of how interconnected and interdependent all our work is,” Blackwood told Federal News Network, speaking in her capacity as an AFGE member. “It’s really going to be impossible for them to have the same effect without the rest of the support from NIOSH. We were already facing staffing shortages — pre-2019 staffing levels — before all this happened. Funding has been staying level for the last several years. So really, most of the function of NIOSH is gone at this point.”
Even after the partial reinstatements, Micah Niemeier-Walsh, a NIOSH employee and vice president of AFGE Local 3840, said most programs are still unable to fully operate. For instance, some employees were reinstated in NIOSH’s health hazard evaluation program as part of last week’s partial reversal of the RIF. But the chemists who analyze the samples the program receives have not been reinstated. That staffing gap means the evaluation program, similar to many of NIOSH’s programs, cannot complete its work despite appearing on paper to be up-and-running.
“It’s a step in the right direction that some NIOSH employees have been reinstated, but it’s not enough. We cannot actually function and meet our congressionally mandated mission with just 300 employees,” Niemeier-Walsh told Federal News Network at Thursday’s rally outside HHS headquarters.
Story continues below image.
Federal union representatives hold a rally outside HHS headquarters in Washington, D.C., to urge the reinstatement of hundreds of terminated employees at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH). Micah Niemeier-Walsh, a NIOSH employee and vice president of AFGE Local 3840, speaks to the crowd that gathered for the event. (Photo credit: AFL-CIO)
In the Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, Kennedy promised “to reinstate some of those other jobs” at NIOSH, although he did not provide details on which jobs would be brought back, or which employees would be reinstated.
NIOSH employees said the reinstatements at the agency so far appear inconsistent. Brendan Demich, chief steward for AFGE Local 1916 in Pittsburgh, said research division employees working in NIOSH’s Pittsburgh and Spokane, Washington, offices are still laid off, but employees in the Coal Workers’ Surveillance Program have been brought back to work.
Demich said the staffing cuts undermine Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda, which is focused in part on addressing chronic health conditions.
“Secretary Kennedy, in these hearings, has been identifying chronic diseases and illnesses as being some of the things that they’re trying to target with HHS,” Demich said in an interview. “What we do at NIOSH is we study the things that cause these chronic illnesses and diseases, things that people are exposed to — chemicals in mining. We try to prevent people from ever getting black lung in the first place. We develop technologies and solutions so that they’re not exposed to the coal dust that causes black lung. We’re trying to fulfill that mission.”
Rachel Weiss, an alternate steward for AFGE Local 3840 in Cincinnati, Ohio, added that NIOSH lost all its grants staff and most of its operational staff who support the agency’s long-term planning, including its National Occupational Research Agenda.
“That’s where we work very, very closely with industry and with labor, to make sure that the research we’re doing in the future addresses the needs of workers,” Weiss said. “The future is in question. That’s what we need the entirety of the agency back, because we all work as one giant organism to do what we do.”
The post ‘This isn’t how a RIF is supposed to work:’ HHS reinstates some laid-off employees, gives them extra work first appeared on Federal News Network.
