WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is set to eliminate thousands of federal health care jobs Friday, targeting employees across public health and science agencies who were hired in the past one to two years.

Senior officials were informed in meetings Friday morning that roughly 5,200 people on probationary employment — recent hires — across agencies including the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will be fired that afternoon, according to sources briefed on the meetings. CDC leadership was told the Atlanta-based agency would lose about 1,300 workers. The numbers at the NIH are not clear, but exceptions are being made for certain probationary employees, according to a memo viewed by STAT.

The workers will be given a month’s paid leave but lose access to work systems by the end of Friday, according to sources.

In addition to the probationary workers, an unspecified number of contract workers at the CDC and other Health and Human Services agencies have been informed over the course of the past week that their jobs had been terminated, including dozens at the Vaccine Research Center housed at NIH. Many jobs at these agencies are done by contract workers.

Other changes are expected, particularly at the leadership levels of organizations. When Susan Monarez, a former ARPA-H official, was named acting director of the CDC, she informed staff she would transition into the role of acting principal deputy director once Dave Weldon, the nominee to lead the agency, is confirmed. That move signaled that the current acting principal deputy director, Nirav Shah, who joined the CDC in March 2023, was likely out of a job. Earlier this week, Shah told CDC staff that his last day at the agency would be Feb. 28, a source told STAT.

Head of ARPA-H and Biden appointee Renee Wegrzyn told staff Friday morning that she was fired, a source told STAT. The agency, established in 2022 by Biden to work with the private sector on breakthrough medical technology, employs less than 200 workers. Because of the agency’s newness, most employees are considered probationary and could be targeted for layoffs. 

In a Friday post on LinkedIn, Wegrzyn wrote, “For the past two and a half years, I have woken up each day with both excitement and a sense of urgency to build a new and transformative capability for the American people. … While today started that same way, it ends such that I no longer have the opportunity to serve as the Director of ARPA-H.”

One high-level researcher who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that the NIH has effectively shut down a highly competitive intramural research program for undergraduate degree holders before they start graduate or medical school. It’s responsible for the next generation of leaders in biomedical sciences, the researcher said: “These are the best and the brightest to get their training and become world class scientists to compete with China.” The program had about 1,600 people in it last year; more than 1,000 positions will not be filled, the person said.

The move to purge health agency probationary employees is in line with the aggressive workforce cuts taking place across government. The Trump administration, aided by Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service, is planning mass layoffs. Federal workers have also been encouraged to leave via a buyout offer, return-to-work order, and the threat of limited legal protections. 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who was confirmed as Health and Human Services secretary on Thursday, has repeatedly promised to clear out federal health agencies. He has said he wants to eliminate “entire departments” at the FDA and fire 600 employees at the NIH. In an X post, he told FDA employees that they are “part of a corrupt system” and warned them “to preserve their records and pack their bags.” 

Kennedy told Fox News on Thursday night that most lower-level HHS employees are “good public servants”, but expressed his intent to “move away” people who he believes have made bad decisions.  

“For example, on the nutrition guidelines, people who have … there’s people at NIH that were involved in the amyloid plaque scandals that derailed Alzheimer’s treatment for 20 years,” Kennedy said. “It’s all corruption. Those kind of people need to be moved.”

Experts have warned that mass layoffs or resignations could severely disrupt work at the FDA and other agencies. Several senior leaders left even before Kennedy’s confirmation — top NIH officials Larry Tabak and Michael Lauer announced plans to leave earlier this week. Patrizia Cavazzoni, the top drug regulator at the FDA, left in January. Others worry that policies like interrupting grant reviews and slashing overhead research payments will cause a broader brain drain across U.S. academia. 

HHS employs more than 80,000 people across its federal health agencies, including more than 20,000 people at the $47 billion-a-year NIH, which funds research into cancer, Alzheimer’s, infectious diseases, and rare illnesses. The CDC, with around 15,000 employees, operates on a $9.2 billion budget and is charged with outbreak response and public health protections.

Lev Facher and Ed Silverman contributed reporting.