Summary
The Department of Health and Human Services began laying off 10,000 employees Tuesday as part of a major workforce reduction led by Elon Musk.
The cuts, affecting the CDC, FDA, NIH, and CMS, target divisions focused on HIV, minority health, drug approvals, and vaccine oversight.
Entire teams, like the FDA’s media office, were eliminated. Dr. Peter Marks, a key vaccine regulator, was also ousted.
Critics, including lawmakers, warn the layoffs threaten public health.
This might be a dumb question, but is there any way a state could just open their own FDA media office (or whatever, just using that as an example) separate from these federal agencies?
No not easily. The FDA media office is not a great example because they disseminate FDA information between the public and FDA officials, so no state would be able to take that over because…where would they get the info? But as far as states taking over the research labs - that is incredibly expensive. FDA is currently like 7 to 8 billion $ per year from the budget. I’m reading about the FDA right now though, and they do have lots of offices in many states and work with states on food safety and all that, so I guess each state could start its own small version of the fda. The waste/overlap that comes with having each state have its own little FDA would be ridiculous though