Get the latest news from our field
According to new data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) started the year with just over 76,000 employees, a drop from the more than 92,000 in 2024, an almost 18% decrease.
The details:
- Offices hit hardest by the layoffs include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), and Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
- Nearly half of SAMHSA’s staff is gone, with employees dropping from 916 in 2024 to 547 at the start of 2026.
- FDA staffing dropped from 20,912 to 16,901, and CDC declined from 12,820 to 10,054.
But: The decrease is not as large as HHS Secretary Kennedy had promised, as he said in March that HHS would shrink by nearly 25%, from 82,000 employees to 62,000. And the 76,000 number from OPM does not match the 80,000 employees HHS said it had at the end of September.
- HHS has had to rehire some workers, including hundreds at CDC’s National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. As a condition to end the October government shutdown, HHS also rehired thousands of employees, mostly from CDC, it laid off during the shutdown.
- The different numbers presented sow confusion about how much HHS was downsized, amid an opaque process of mass layoffs and rehiring.
Read more: HHS by the numbers: The latest headcount
Published
January 2026