What a difference a week makes. After hundreds of FDA employees were suddenly laid off last weekend—including dozens at the agency’s device center tasked with reviewing products for clearance and approval—the government has begun rescinding some of those cuts and attempting to rehire lost workers.
According to Fierce Healthcare, FDA employees started receiving phone calls late Friday and Saturday morning saying they were being reinstated, and that emails would follow with more information—though it was unclear how many would be returning to their jobs.
Reuters reported that the agency aims to rehire about 300 people in total, after the White House previously confirmed that more than 1,000 probationary workers were let go across its device, drug and food regulation divisions.
Scott Whitaker, CEO of the medical device trade association AdvaMed, estimated that at least 180 workers were laid off from the Center for Devices and Radiological Health’s staff of about 2,000—including many paid for by user fees collected from the medtech industry, instead of out of federal budget appropriations.
In a media briefing last week, Whitaker also said it appeared CDRH was disproportionately affected by the cuts compared to the FDA’s drug and biologic-focused teams in part because those user fee agreements—through legislation negotiated with industry and passed by Congress every five years—included provisions to grow the agency’s staff toward the goal of reducing product review times.
Layoffs led by the White House and the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, have largely affected probationary workers in their first one-to-two years of civil service, as well as longer-term staff who may have moved into new positions, who typically have fewer legal protections against being fired compared to other federal workers.
Whitaker also said the reductions impacted many FDA staffers working on cutting-edge programs—including artificial intelligence and brain-computer interfaces—specifically because they were recently brought on to help the agency address technologies that have rapidly advanced in the past few years.
According to STAT, two of the three people let go from the FDA’s digital health office were rehired, in addition to other employees tasked with reviewing AI-powered imaging software. All Twelve product reviewers, who had been focused on surgical and infection-control devices, were reinstated as well.
The about-face at the FDA follows several abrupt reversals in layoffs across the federal government’s many departments—from personnel in charge of safeguarding the country’s nuclear weapons to scientists who track the spread of bird flu.