“They Tried to Save Lives, but the Trump Administration Let Them Go” – ProPublica

Every day, they tackled complex issues with life-or-death stakes:

A failure to get donor organs to critically ill patients.

Tobacco products designed to appeal to kids.

Maternal and infant death.

They were hired after lawmakers and bureaucrats debated and negotiated and persuaded their colleagues — sometimes over the course of years — to make those problems someone’s job to solve.

Then, this month, they were fired as part of President Donald Trump’s widespread purge of federal workers. Suddenly, the future of their public health missions was in question.

The White House hasn’t released figures on how many have been fired, but news reports have begun to take stock: about 750 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which plays a central role responding to pandemics; more than 1,000 staffers at the National Institutes of Health, which funds and conducts life-saving research; dozens at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which manages public health care and insurance programs; and scores of employees at the Food and Drug Administration, which oversees the safety of food, drugs and medical devices.

Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to gut the federal health centers, stating “entire departments” at the FDA should be cut. Neither the administration nor the federal agencies responded to ProPublica’s questions, but a White House spokesperson has previously said they were removing newer employees who were “not mission critical.”

“The implications for the health of the public are grave,” said Susan Polan, an associate executive director at the American Public Health Association, which is suing the Department of Government Efficiency, the group leading the firings, for violating federal transparency laws. “It is unfathomable that anybody thinks these cuts have value and are doing anything other than being performative.”

ProPublica reporters have spoken with dozens of federal workers employed in roles safeguarding the American public from harm. They described losing critical positions they’d spent years training for. Many expressed fear at what would happen to the work they left behind.

ProPublica is recording the casualties of the purge, highlighting the scale of what is being lost as public health programs and seasoned experts are caught in the Trump administration’s blunt-force drive to shrink the federal government.

Protecting Kids From Tobacco

For more than a decade, Dustin Brace has worked various federal jobs, serving as an emergency 911 dispatcher for the Navy and, as a member of the Coast Guard, responding to major chemical and oil spills. “I loved working to protect the American people,” he said. “I never thought that I would leave the government.”

Last year, when he joined the FDA, his mission was no different. As a social scientist at the agency’s Center for Tobacco Products, he helped regulate e-cigarettes and related items. Some were being designed to look like kid-friendly foods, resembling cans of grape soda, or decorated with cartoons, like unicorns eating pancakes. In recent years, more young children had been landing in emergency rooms, poisoned by liquid nicotine. And once in a while, devices explode — in people’s pockets, or hands, or faces. One man died after shrapnel entered his brain.

Every week, Brace scrutinized new product applications to ensure that they would not appeal to children and that the devices were safe for consumer use. The work required a close and careful review of thousands of pages of documents, combing them for hidden hazards. “The work takes time to be done properly,” he said.

His job, and the center as a whole, were born out of a bipartisan understanding that the tobacco industry needed to be regulated. It wasn’t until 2009, after decades of industry pushback, that the FDA finally gained the broad legal authority to do so.

The agency has historically struggled to recruit enough scientists and experts, who could receive higher salaries in the private sector. “People don’t come to agencies like the FDA and centers like CTP for the money,” said Mitch Zeller, who was the center’s director from 2013 through 2022. “They come because they believe in the mission.”

Notably, the center’s regulatory activities are funded through tobacco industry fees, and it does not rely on direct federal support. “Not one taxpayer dollar is spent to regulate the tobacco industry,” said Zeller.

Last Saturday, Brace received a termination notice along with other newer employees on his team. Like those sent to other federal workers, his contained boilerplate language citing poor performance, even though Brace had received favorable reviews over the past year, according to his assessment records.

Brace estimated that more than 10% of staff at the center’s science office were terminated in the past week.

“Things are going to slow down,” Brace said. “More mistakes may be made because the workload is so much higher.”

Keeping Mothers and Babies From Dying