'People are going to get sick': Fired HHS scientists protest federal terminations
Bracing the frigid temperatures, crowds of former and current federal workers protested the deep cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services on Wednesday, warning it will permanently set back scientific progress in the United States.
The protest comes as thousands have been laid off across HHS and President Donald Trump and Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency try to shrink the size of the federal government.
A woman who was just laid off as a food safety chemist with the Food and Drug Administration told ABC News the cuts to the agency will make the food supply more dangerous.
"I think it's going to make it a lot harder to test as much as we're testing," she said. "We randomly sample food all over the country for different things, and when there are less people to do the work, I think people are going to get sick."
She recently graduated with her doctorate and was responsible for developing new chemical methods to measure how sources such as plastic could transfer into foods.
"I have felt a lot of things in the past couple of days. Yes, grief is probably the biggest one," the woman told ABC News, adding that the FDA was her first job. "I probably told my friends and family that I was a lifer in the federal government, like I had found the place that I wanted to build my career because I found such purpose in being able to protect Americans and our food supply."
Katie Reichard, carrying her 6-month-old baby in the freezing cold, told ABC News she oversaw research to help address the drug overdose crisis before she was fired from HHS for being a probationary worker.
"There's a higher risk the money isn't getting to the communities that need it most, and the research won't be done," Reichard said, adding that her team ensured "there isn't any waste, fraud or abuse, and now, they're taking away the people that oversee that."
Reichard said her team was already understaffed before the firings began.
When asked what her message was to HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who says he wants to make America healthy again and fight chronic disease, Reichard said: "There's a lot of scientists who were the kind of up-and-coming experts in the field who just got fired, and we were ready to work toward those goals, as long as it was a real investment in the evidence ... about how we start to address those chronic health issues like overdose and substance use disorder, and he just let us go."
Reichard is now scrambling to find another job so she can provide for her family and ensure her baby and toddler have health insurance.
"We're probably going to leave Washington, D.C., with the cost of living, and I'm not optimistic we'll find a job here based on the unemployment situation," she said.
Katie Overby, who works in the FDA's office that conducts scientific reviews before new ingredients are used in the food supply, said her office has lost about 10% of its workforce, including scientists and administrative employees.
"It almost feels like a bomb site," she said. "We're just sifting through, still trying to figure out who all was even fired."
Overby said people were laid off who were in the middle of reviewing ingredients, ensuring that they were safe before being authorized for use.
"All of those reviews are just stopped right now, and we're scrambling," she said.
"If we can't do our reviews and no one's enforcing regulations anymore, I think there's a worry that companies may stop coming to us, that we may lose oversight on the things that are going in our food supply, and that's a scary place to be, not knowing what's going in our food, not having anyone to hold industry accountable," she added.
Instead of making the government more efficient, Overby said the cuts are having the opposite effect.
"We're losing probably at this point, days, weeks, months just trying to scramble to respond to what's happened. And that's all the time," she said. "We're not actually protecting the public and reviewing the safety of food."
