Health Department Staffers Aren't Buying Rfk Jr.'s Peace Offerings

When you call your employees a “sock puppet” of industry, blame them for bungling the pandemic, and fire thousands of their colleagues, it’s not easy to take it back.

But Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his health department deputies have pared back the insults this year. They’ve even occasionally had nice things to say about the civil servants who work for them. They’re hiring again after the DOGEing of 2025. The shift coincides with a broader shakeup of agency leadership that the department has said is about producing better results for the American people.

More than a dozen federal employees and contractors who work inside the Department of Health and Human Services told POLITICO they’ve noticed the change in tone, but aren’t seeing as much in the way of substance. They said they continue to distrust Kennedy and his deputies’ policy decisions. But some also said the open hostility towards career employees and the daily chaos that marked 2025 has given way to some semblance of routine, as the longtime employees who hung on try to get their work done without attracting Kennedy’s attention. Many pointed to fear of retribution as their reason for not wanting to be named.

“They've cultivated an environment of mistrust and abuse over the last year and a half,” said one contractor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the agency Kennedy has most often maligned. “People are not just going to forget what's been done.”

Recent moves suggest Kennedy is trying to move past the chaotic downsizing led by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency — in which 20,000 health department workers were bought out or let go — to a pre-DOGE business-as-usual, at least in part.

CDC staff, for example, are engaged in responding to an Ebola outbreak in Central Africa and managing a hantavirus outbreak that occurred on a cruise ship — and have been allowed to regularly brief the media about the outbreak responses. Controversial leaders Marty Makary and Vinay Prasad — who led the agency during a period of dysfunction, mass-firings and whiplash decisions — are out at the Food and Drug Administration. National Institutes of Health Director Jay Bhattacharya is reassuring lawmakers that despite a slow start, the agency will dispense billions in grants by the end of the fiscal year.

Kennedy told lawmakers at a House hearing this spring he’s seeking to return to pre-DOGE staffing levels and has embarked on a hiring blitz to get there.

Even so, CDC employees told POLITICO they are still on edge about Kennedy and his political appointees injecting his vaccine-skeptical views into scientific communications and policy decisions. The administration appears to be laying the groundwork to downsize the list of vaccines it recommends for children again after a federal judge got in its way.

Career scientists at the Food and Drug Administration are reportedly unnerved by shifting standards, which they believe are driven by ideology. At the NIH, reviewers said they continue to have to scrutinize applications that mention certain words related to diversity — and, at times, work with researchers to change the wording. At FDA, a priority review program for certain drugs has industry experts worried that the president's political agenda could be injected into the agency’s decisions.

Many staff said they’re not sure what to make of the shift in tone, but said they do see it. Bhattacharya — who in addition to heading the NIH is now temporarily leading the CDC after Kennedy ousted the previous agency head last year — told CDC employees in March at an all-hands meeting he was “inspired every day” by them.

Chris Klomp, the deputy administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services recently tasked with overseeing all HHS operations, similarly called career CMS employees “extraordinary individuals,” who “love their country” at a speaking engagement in April.

Even Kennedy seemed to acknowledge in congressional testimony that he may have been too harsh in his critical assessments of his career staff last year. “I'm not saying that people who lost their jobs were bad actors. They weren't,” he told Maryland Democrat Steny Hoyer at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing in April.

Recent personnel moves have also suggested a change in direction to the employees. Erica Schwartz, the latest pick to lead the CDC, has a history of public service that isn’t marked by vaccine skepticism or controversy, unlike some of Kennedy’s past selections for top roles. One CDC employee described her as “the kind of nominee that I would have expected from a normal administration.”

An official at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration pointed to newly appointed political leadership, Chief of Staff Timothy Westlake and Senior Adviser Rick Lambert, as an improvement, noting that their passion for the agency’s work has helped restore trust among staff.

“Having any political [appointee] that cares about the people we serve and cares about our mission, regardless of politics, I think that's always a positive,” the official said.

An FDA staffer said the low ebb for career staff came last year with the DOGE layoffs followed by a lengthy government shutdown, after which the turmoil calmed. “Despite the drama surrounding Makary’s departure, replacing him with Kyle seems to continue the trajectory of a more stable footing,” the staffer said, referencing the appointment last month of the head of the agency’s food division, Kyle Diamantas, as acting commissioner.

Diamantas has reassured staff with his “moves to install other similarly serious people in leadership positions,” the staffer said, adding that employees were nonetheless still on edge. “There’s still a lot of vacancies, a lot of uncertainty among career staff. I don’t think anyone thinks things are fully back to normal, if they ever could be, but it definitely feels better than it did a year ago.”

The new normal

Bhattacharya was effusive at a CDC staff meeting in March, telling those present he wished he could meet every single one of them personally.

At that meeting, a video of which was reviewed by POLITICO, Bhattacharya repeatedly gushed about CDC employees, touting a decision he pushed for to give them more flexibility to work from home — a benefit that was reduced last year as DOGE pushed for federal employees to work in person — and promising to rehire employees who worked on combatting chronic diseases before they were fired in a DOGE-era purge.

He also promised to oppose future mass firings, saying they’re “not in the best interest of the CDC” or “the country.”

“We have to move past the last year, and I think we now have an opportunity really to do that,” he added.

Bhattacharya’s leadership at the CDC has, for some, made a difference.

“When Jay came in, there were a lot of people who were like, ‘we don't entirely trust this guy,’” said one CDC official, granted anonymity for fear of retribution.

“But he came in, and he stopped treating us like we were dog crap on the bottom of his shoe, which is pretty much the way that we had been treated ever since many of the senior-most career leaders of the agency were pushed out or left voluntarily because they couldn’t be party to what was happening anymore.”

And the administration is working toward getting the CDC a permanent, Senate-confirmed leader — with bona fides.

Schwartz, Trump's CDC pick, is a career civil servant who previously served as a deputy surgeon general. She's a far cry from Dave Weldon, the former Florida Congressman and well-known vaccine skeptic, who has repeatedly said he believes vaccines can cause autism. Weldon was the administration’s first selection to run the CDC, but the White House pulled his nomination after it became clear he did not have enough votes to win Senate confirmation.

At the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which oversees mental health and addiction recovery efforts, an official told POLITICO that “things have stabilized a little bit” in recent months. Roughly half of the agency’s staff was hollowed out by layoffs and voluntary departures after Kennedy arrived.

The official, granted anonymity due to fear of retribution, partially attributed the improvement to the recent leadership hires who are popular with staff. Earlier cuts may have also protected the agency from being targeted again.

In January, the Trump administration abruptly canceled, then reinstated within 24 hours, $2 billion in SAMHSA grants. While the episode rattled grantees and sparked backlash from lawmakers, the official said they believe the debacle saved the agency from further disruption.

“I actually think that what happened with the grants in January was really good," the official said.

"Whatever intervention happened at the White House…I think they've been more hesitant to make decisions that negatively impact SAMHSA and the mental health and substance use community more broadly. “

Behind the scenes

The Trump administration's softened rhetoric doesn't necessarily reflect deeper changes to department operations.

The majority of health department employees who spoke with POLITICO said they’re still unhappy with life at work, and don’t feel that they can do their jobs as effectively as they could before the Trump administration.

Early this month, Trump signed an executive order reclassifying the jobs of thousands of career civil servants as “at will” employees, making them easier to fire. The policy has been championed by White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, who has made no secret of his view that career staff have impeded Trump or of his desire to put them “in trauma.”

A different executive order Trump signed in May made clear that the administration plans to continue its effort to pare down the childhood vaccine schedule, despite a federal judge’s decision pausing earlier changes.

The administration is appealing that decision, which also stayed many of the Kennedy-selected appointments to the expert panel that advises the CDC on vaccines.

At FDA, Makary's controversial Commissioner’s National Priority Voucher program will continue without the commissioner. The program, intended to expedite drug and biologic reviews addressing “national health priorities,” has been criticized for involving the agency’s political leadership in deciding which companies get awarded commissioner's national priority review vouchers, raising concerns about perceptions of corruption.

HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said that “final regulatory decisions remain with the appropriate FDA product center,” adding that under the program, “applications are reviewed by FDA scientific staff and subject to the same statutory and regulatory standards for safety, effectiveness, and quality as other applications.”

At SAMHSA, prolonged and unusual grant delays are causing problems for the providers of addiction treatment, prevention and mental health services that rely on the funding.

NIH employees say they're enduring slowdowns, too. Four employees at the health research agency, two of whom were granted anonymity for fear of retribution, described changes to how the agency awards grant money that make their jobs infinitely more difficult.

The agency receives tens of thousands of grant applications every year that need to be meticulously reviewed before NIH decides if it will fund them.

Those applications first go to a scientific review group, which is managed by the agency but made up of outside experts, the “peers,” recruited for their subject matter expertise. That group, after it completes the review, gives each application a score.

To speed the process, NIH institutes and centers historically relied on this peer scoring system to decide whether to fund grants.

But NIH stopped relying on the scoring system in January, meaning institute or center directors often need to carefully review each grant as well.

That change has made the process “very, very, very, very slow,” said Sarah Kobrin, chief of the Health Systems and Interventions Research Branch at NIH. “Peer reviewers, the people who go to the study sections, spend hours and hours on each application, and so if we're going to be asked to do that same thing, it's not going to happen quickly.”

A New York Times analysis, published in April, found that spending on new medical research by the agency has fallen around $1 billion behind the pace of past years.

And program directors, who are tasked with guiding researchers through the grant application process, have been struggling with another problem: overly-sensitive grant screening requirements intended to ensure that grants funded are in line with administration priorities.

One anonymous NIH employee said that the screening tool unnecessarily flags words that could be associated with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, even if the context is unrelated, like the phrase "diverse disciplinary backgrounds.” When a grant is flagged, project officers must then review the language.

In a statement, Hilliard said that the “tools used in the process support, but do not replace, human judgment,” adding that NIH is “committed to a fair, objective, and evidence-based funding system.”

But the NIH employees say the changes have slowed down the work so much that it’s impacted the nature of some of their jobs.

“My job, I don't really feel like the scientific part exists anymore,” she said, adding, “the fact is that right now everybody's hands are tied by an overwhelming amount of paperwork.”

Employees at other health department agencies told similar stories of persisting inefficiencies and dysfunction. At CDC, staffers said there are also ongoing concerns about scientific integrity, though Hilliard stressed that the agency’s communications are informed by the agency’s leading experts and public health professionals.

“We've had so much manhandling by political appointees at this point that I'm scared every time we release some sort of scientific statement,” said one CDC employee, granted anonymity for fear of retribution, citing fears that political priorities are warping the agency's communications with the public.

“I'm scared, because I'm like, is this real?"

Amanda Friedman contributed to this report.