Asia McGillSiobhan DeLancey, 56, planned to work at the FDA for six more years, but the layoffs at the Food and Drug Administration forced her into early retirement. She applied for a $25,000 payout but was denied, despite believing she had qualified.
“I tried to ask like, ‘can you tell me why I wasn’t eligible for VSIP?’ she said of the Voluntary Separation Incentive Payment. The response: “Crickets.”
DeLancey is just one of the 3,500 FDA employees on a rollercoaster ride since April 1, when the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the FDA, initiated mass layoffs.
Former federal employees have been plunged headfirst into a sea of unemployment and early retirement, some re-entering the DMV workforce for the first time in years.
As lawsuits pile up, many employees remain in limbo on their job status. A few have been rehired, but not enough to replace the thousands who have left. Currently, former employees who have not retired early have been placed on administrative leave. Those leaves are set to expire on June 2.
Former employees described the aftermath of mass layoffs as chaotic, with communication about their next steps being especially strained.
DeLancey, for example, said she emailed the incentive payment program team seven times, and after weeks of cold emailing, she was officially denied the week of May 4.
VSIP is a $25,000 payment available to all laid-off employees who meet its criteria, but it is offered as a stack-on to early retirement candidates.
Applications for early retirement and VSIP were due shortly after the two exit strategies were announced.
That means DeLancey had 11 days to decide if she wanted to retire early from her 21-year career. Otherwise, she would’ve been laid off. Ultimately, she digitally signed her early retirement slip, and her retirement date was set for April 19.
For the FDA, DeLancey, of Union Bridge, Maryland, served as the senior advisor for strategic communications in the Center for Veterinary Medicine for the last seven years of her career at the Rockville, Maryland, campus. There, she led a team of health communication specialists who reported on vital health updates to the public.
“ A lot of people think that we’re just like puppies and kittens and happy, feel good stories,” DeLancey said. “There is a lot more to that that people don’t think about because we regulate what goes into the animals that become your food, and I felt like that perspective was often lost.”
The work left behind
Before layoffs swept the work off DeLancey’s desk, her team had still been closely monitoring the bird flu —a health threat that she said could potentially be worse than COVID if left unmonitored.
“ We have the potential of another epidemic, another worldwide epidemic at our doorstep, and you’re gonna fire the people who are working on it directly? That is the one that just really kills me,” DeLancey said.
DeLancey outlined more risks attached to FDA firings in her opinion piece How the FDA communication axe impacts food safety and freedom to Food Safety News on April 22. She said she’d been thinking about writing this article “a long time before it ran.”
“ I really wanted to write it after the first when that my team got laid off but I was afraid that the administration would take revenge. I’ve never felt that way in any other position that I’ve been in,” DeLancey said.
Currently, she is waiting to see if she’ll receive her work performance award for top performers in 2024, which could be a small cash award of around $500 to $800.
“Those awards are usually made around this time [of year] and no one knows if we will actually get them,” she said in a text message.
DMV economy strained; institutional knowledge wiped
While the economic impact of federal layoffs continues to unfold, some experts believe that layoffs, combined with current unemployment, are a double-edged sword. In other words: loss of fundamental work, loss of knowledge.
The public is generally aware of the layoffs. But to others, the situation is more personal. Celeste Davis thinks about its impact on her community.
“I’m worried about the red dye and food, but I’m also worried about if my neighbors can actually afford food, too,” Davis said in a Zoom interview.
Davis is an American University health studies professor. Though her work does not directly overlap with the FDA, she thinks about her friends and colleagues who have lost their jobs, and what it means for the future of public health training.
In terms of how the public can trust the health information being released post-layoffs, Davis said she doesn’t know.
“If we’re changing research data to not have certain words because of political ideologies, that doesn’t sound good. And if that’s going to be the sentiment across all these types of actions, that’s not good,” Davis said.
‘Bread and butter’ let go.
Losing institutional expertise is costly enough, but it also sets off a ripple effect that hits the entire support team.
Under normal circumstances, Sydney Verdine’s department would’ve helped DeLancey with things like early retirement. Verdine’s support to staff went beyond that, and she helped between 300 and 500 departments, she said.
“There’s people who are pending early retirement and they don’t know what date [they end], they don’t know when to take their stuff. You know, they’re just sitting there,” Verdine said in a phone interview.
Verdine, 35, is a Maryland resident who worked as a management analyst in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research at the White Oak, Maryland, campus. She said her entire team were let go, even her superiors.
She described her department as the backbone of the work that is done at the FDA.
“We were the operating staff, the bread and butter, you know, just to help everything run smoothly, and I have been told that without us being there … it’s chaotic without us there,”
Verdine was asked to help with timekeeping and credit entry while she’s on administrative leave, but said there wasn’t much help she could offer since she didn’t have access to everyone’s timesheets.
“Every ecosystem needs every single part to thrive. And when you pull something from the ecosystem, it messes with it. It’s no longer the same,” Verdine said.
A chainsaw vs. a scalpel
An FDA instructional systems specialist requested that their name not be used after seeing an article about investigations targeting laid-off workers who had spoken to the press.
The former FDA employee trained physicians to be clinical reviewers, creating master classes, e-learning materials and instructional recordings to ensure physicians are up to speed. They described their role as “no other training in the world.”
Clinical reviewers at the FDA oversee the testing of new medications during clinical trials, where they assess side effects and determine whether the medication is safe for release to the public. Clinical reviewers have a year to review all data to make a final determination.
The former FDA employee worked remotely from the Midwest, where their work was shared across all FDA campuses.
With a gut to almost all of the former FDA employee’s team, only the physicians, who are also training clinical reviewers, remain standing. The former employee stated that it’s not safe for them to perform their job alone.
“ To me, I feel like it’s just dangerous to not have people who are fully trained to do their job, and there’s nothing available and there’s not going to be anything available for who knows how long,” they said.
“ I knew that the Republican agenda was to cut the workforce. What I didn’t realize is how they were going to do it. I didn’t realize they were gonna take a chainsaw versus a scalpel,” the former FDA employee said.
Termination letter errors
The former employee said they were one of many other former federal workers that reported mistakes in their termination letter.
The Wash issued mock corrections to highlight the sections the former FDA employee identified as incorrect. These edits do not reflect all potential errors, as the former employee is still consulting with their superiors to better understand the letter’s contents. Certain areas of the letter have been blacked out to protect the individuals’ identities.
On April 29, the Health and Human Services (HHS) Public Affairs office received a request to comment on why employees had errors on their RIF letters and whether official corrections would be issued.
This was the explanation for why errors occurred.
“All of the data in the RIF notices was populated from HHS’s human resources system of record. To the extent there are errors, it is because the data collected by HHS’s multiple, siloed HR divisions is inaccurate. This is exactly why HHS is reorganizing its administrative functions to streamline operations and fix the broken systems left to us by the Biden Administration. Streamlining this into one operation will allow for enhanced data integrity and coordination,” said an HHS spokesperson.
When asked if the errors would be corrected, the spokesperson did not respond.
Living in Limbo as Gen Z
The FDA was Menna Ibrahim’s first big career move as a 25-year-old graduate student, and her work has already crumbled before her.
This month, Ibrahim is set to graduate from the Merrill College of Journalism MA program. She also worked full-time as an FDA recruitment and outreach management analyst since July 2022.
“ It’s already hard to navigate your first job as is. And it seems to be significantly more difficult when the government and the people that are supposed to protect you, quote unquote, are making it significantly harder to navigate,” Ibrahim said.
After being unable to return to the FDA communications department since the April 1 layoff, Ibrahim still has yet to receive a RIF letter.
Ibrahim resides in the Trinidad neighborhood of Northeast D.C., about an hour’s commute from her Rockville FDA campus.
She had the day off on April 1, but woke up to the news of her colleagues and supervisor being terminated. Her supervisor told her to log in to her work email to see if she had received the RIF sent out at 6:05 that morning.
Ibrahim logged in at 8 a.m. – nothing. She texted her colleagues to see what was going on.
“ They had all received theirs. And so I was really confused. I was like, ‘Do I still have a job? Do I not? What’s the vibe?” Ibrahim said in a phone interview.
Her supervisor said that the letter may arrive in her inbox around noon, and to keep an eye on her laptop.
By mid-May, the message had still not arrived.
A part of Ibrahim hoped she survived the swinging axe of unemployment. The next day, she drove the hour-long commute to the Rockville office. She swiped into the garage, and her card worked. But she still had to swipe into the building. Her building swipe didn’t work, and at that moment, she’d realized her job was gone.
Ibrahim had a feeling she wouldn’t survive staffing cuts anyway being the youngest on her team.
“I knew if they were going to keep one person on my team, the likelihood that it would be me is super low because I have way less experience than the people that I worked with,” she said.
Ibrahim’s work as a recruitment and outreach management analyst supported student interns and post-graduates. She also managed the FDA’s LinkedIn and X (formerly Twitter) page and wrote for the agency’s bimonthly newsletter.
She planned to stay at the FDA until she found her dream job to be in a newsroom after graduation, but the security net fell beneath her.
“Because I’ve been let go, things feel a lot more urgent and I feel like I’m a lot more desperate to take on any role that will pay me,” Ibrahim said.
Being a journalist and a former FDA employee hasn’t been easy for Ibrahim, but she said being a reporter makes her “have so much more empathy for federal workers.”
Frustrations continue after layoffs
Corrilisha Telford couldn’t attend Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s speech on April 11 because she was let go, but said her colleagues who could attend told her they were “very upset” by his remarks.
In Kennedy’s speech at the White Oak campus, he referred to the FDA as a “sock puppet for the industry it was supposed to regulate,” which were one of the many statements that did not sit well with the crowd.
There are “people [who] are still working there, and you’re telling them that their work doesn’t matter basically,” Telford said.
Kennedy has stated that his plans to slash health agency staff will lead to significant cost savings, and projected the layoffs to save taxpayers $1.8 billion annually.
Telford said that cuts to her department would not save taxpayers any money, as it’s funded by user fees – charges paid by individuals or businesses to government agencies for access to services and resources.
Telford, 28, of Silver Spring, Maryland, worked for the FDA for three and a half years, and in the last nine months of her role, she worked in the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER). Her office handled regulatory policy.
For her colleagues who remain, she is worried about how they will be able to function with a minimized staff.
“I’m concerned for my colleagues, because it’s not working.”
Telford said she’s unsure how she fits into the world now. Within her first two weeks of unemployment, Telford applied for 20 to 30 positions, but her skill sets required don’t fully mirror her FDA expertise.
Like Verdine, Telford was also asked if she could return to work after the layoff to help with the transition of work.
Telford did not take up the offer.
“ Why would I do that? Y’all laid me off. Why would I help you?” she said. “And that goes to show you, they just don’t have enough people.”
Katherine Hapgood
Shwetha Surendran
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