SEATTLE — Hundreds of Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) employees based in Washington were abruptly fired or placed on leave from several different offices, including the HHS regional office, the regional Head Start office and a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) laboratory in Spokane.
The cuts come following a vow from Secretary of Health Robert Kennedy Jr. to remake HHS into a new agency called the Administration for a Healthy America, which included purging 20,000 employees from its payroll, nearly a quarter of its workforce. Kennedy Jr. has vowed to do “more with less.”
According to a release from Sen. Patty Murray, this week, “some, if not all,” of the employees at the HHS regional office in Seattle were abruptly fired. That impacts nearly 200 people, Murray estimated…