On Monday night, a longtime employee of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) sat down with his wife at their kitchen table in a D.C. suburb and decided to leave the job he loves.
Three days earlier, he was one of thousands of employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) who received an email offering them up to $25,000, pre-tax, to leave their jobs. Initially, the NIH employee, who analyzes how grants are spent, was not sure he’d take it. The deadline is this Friday at 5 pm, which gives workers only a week to decide whether or not to leave jobs that many have been in for decades. (HHS officials make the final decisions about who gets approved for the buyouts based on who says they want them, according to the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM.)
But over the weekend, the NIH employee considered the toll the past six weeks since President Trump’s inauguration—especially the antics of unelected billionaire Elon Musk—had taken on his mental and physical health and his productivity at work. By Monday, he had made up his mind: “I’m out,” he said.
He and his wife had crunched the numbers and determined they had enough retirement savings—plus from her higher salary—to get by. (He and the other HHS employees Mother Jones spoke to for this story are being granted anonymity for fear of retaliation for speaking out.)
“I just can’t take the hostile work environment and what this administration is doing to our country and to public health in general,” he told me. “I can’t, in good conscience, serve this administration any longer.”
He also worries about what a mass exodus of employees from the agency, either voluntarily due to the buyouts or forcibly as a result of more layoffs, could mean for public health. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an unqualified anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist, is now running the agency. “I absolutely feel like I’m making [this decision] under duress—we’re not being given enough time to think about it,” the NIH worker said. “I didn’t want to leave under these circumstances.”
I spoke with five HHS workers over the past two days who are eligible for the buyouts, three of whom said they plan to try to take it. Two others said they will stay in their jobs. Each one characterizes the choice as a daunting one: Leave and lose income and abandon critical work, or stay and try to continue to make a difference in public health as officials at the highest levels of government seem hellbent on undermining them and imposing burdensome working conditions.
“Somebody has to stay to help clean up the mess that they’re most likely going to make,” a public health advisor on infectious diseases at the CDC told me. “If you want to get rid of me, you’re basically going to drag me kicking and screaming out of here.”
Spokespeople for HHS did not respond to ten detailed questions from Mother Jones on Thursday.
The buyouts are the latest efforts to scale back the workforce at HHS, a massive and highly consequential umbrella agency that employs more than 80,000 people.
Last week, eligible HHS employees were also offered early retirement buyouts under a separate program also managed by OPM, according to an email sent to staff. HHS also reportedly lost 5,200 probationary employees following the purge of those workers across the federal government. The agency has since reportedly rehired some. An unknown amount also resigned from HHS following the January “fork in the road email” that offered federal workers eight months of pay if they resign. It is not immediately clear how many workers at HHS had accepted the latest buyouts. But on Tuesday, HHS seemed to try to entice more workers to do so, by offering employees eight weeks of full pay and benefits in addition to the lump sum, according to a copy of an email to staff reviewed by Mother Jones.
HHS is not alone in trying to lead staff to the door. The Education Department and the Social Security Administration are among those that have also reportedly offered workers the same buyouts HHS workers were offered. And more layoffs will soon hit the entire government, given that Thursday is the deadline for agency heads to come up with “reorganization plans” to implement “large-scale reductions in force,” based on one of Trump’s executive orders, according to OPM.
RFK Jr. has been tight-lipped about which HHS workers will be on the chopping block, saying on Fox last month that he has a “list in my head” of who he wants to go; he also previously said he would fire and replace 600 NIH workers on day one of a second Trump term, as my colleague Anna Merlan wrote—though that has not happened yet.
Ingraham: Do you have list of people that need to be removed and quickly?
RFK JR: I have a list in my head pic.twitter.com/4fyv2wldx7
— Acyn (@Acyn) February 14, 2025
Experts say the impacts of losing thousands more HHS workers could be broadly felt by Americans given the agency’s vast mandate. For some, this is motivation to stay and fight. “Health security is at risk,” said a CDC researcher who studies infectious diseases and plans to reject the buyout. “We had enough problems keeping up during COVID, just having enough employees to be part of the response.”
She and the other CDC researcher pointed to the fact that the CDC is monitoring more than 220 measles cases in Texas and New Mexico, which have led to two deaths so far—incluidng of an unvaccinated child. (RFK wrote in an op-ed for Fox earlier this month about the importance of the measles vaccine—but also characterized vaccination as a “personal” choice. As my colleague Kiera Butler wrote, he has also promoted unproven measles remedies such as steroids and cod liver oil.) Officials are also tracking the bird flu, of which there are 70 cases and one death so far. And influenza, or the flu, has also been surging this season—at the same time that the meeting of the FDA’s flu vaccine panel, to determine the composition of the next flu shot, has been canceled.
Employees working on vaccine-related research are also concerned that their work could be impacted by RFK Jr.’s opposition to it. On Monday, the Washington Post reported that the NIH is terminating or limiting more than 40 grants related to researching vaccine hesitancy. On Sunday, Reuters reported that the CDC is planning a large study into potential connections between vaccines and autism, despite the fact that theories of such links have been disproven. (As of Tuesday afternoon, the CDC website—last updated in December—still noted that.)
The NIH worker who is taking the buyout said those directives are prime examples of why he is leaving. For those who stay at HHS, he predicts “there’s going to be a lot of people forced to do things that go against their personal sense of morality.”
That has already been the case since Trump took office. Several HHS employees say they had to reluctantly carry out his executive orders targeting transgender people and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs across government. “I had two grant applications where I had to tell people, ‘you need to go back and take up every single reference to DEI in this application, because we can’t fund it,’” said a worker in the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), an agency that oversees child welfare, including programs such as Head Start and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Another day recently, the worker—who plans to take the buyout—spent four hours combing through hundreds of pages of documents to eliminate DEI-related language. “It’s insulting,” she said. “They’re just trying to push people out.”
For some, it’s working. A scientific review officer at NIH, who oversees grant applications and plans to take the buyout, recounted “realizing that things that you hold important are no longer valued and are actually demonized” when she was told to remove her pronouns from her email signature and that grant reviewers should ignore parts of applications focused on diversity to comply with the anti-DEI orders. “The things that brought me to public health years ago,” she told me, “are not the things that are being prioritized, if we’re not allowed to be looking at how we create an equitable environment for everybody.”
While lofty ideals may motivate some federal workers’ decisions on the buyouts, practicalities also matter. A sticking point for the scientific research officer is the mandated return-to-office policy, as dictated by one of the executive orders Trump signed on his first day in office.
Some HHS employees reportedly had to return to the office last month, while others—those who live within 50 miles of an HHS office—have to return Monday. Those who live outside the 50-mile radius have been ordered to work from any federal office starting next month.
“Where do we sit? How do we buy things?” one of the CDC researchers asked, noting that offices may not be equipped for an influx of staff from other agencies. There’s also the $1 spending limit imposed by DOGE, which staff worry could prevent them from buying basic office supplies. “It’s hard to function on a day-to-day basis without some assurance that the resources and assets that you might need to do your job are readily available,” the other CDC employee said.
The return-to-office mandate comes at the same time that the administration has curtailed work-related travel. Internal emails that are first being reported by Mother Jones confirm the NIH cancelled its plan to send some National Cancer Institute (NCI) employees to an annual meeting in Chicago in late April, despite it being the only federal office dedicated to researching cancer. The email does not provide a reason why NCI will not exhibit at the conference this year, only saying it’s “in light of current guidance.” An AACR spokesperson said the decision is believed to be due to a travel ban in place at the agency.
An employee of NCI, who was supposed to attend and is not eligible for the buyouts, called the AACR conference “one of the most important cancer research meetings.” Not having a larger presence there, she added, ultimately limits NCI’s reach. The internal NIH email more or less acknowledges this: “We recognize the valuable opportunity that our exhibit booth provides to engage with grantees and the broader research community,” it says, “so we will continue to search for alternative ways to connect and engage with these audiences.” It also says some NCI staff will still be able to attend the conference in-person or virtually, but only to present at sessions on NCI funding opportunities—as long as the content complies with Trump’s executive orders.
Taking the buyout brings its own set of uncertainties and frustrations.
Both NIH employees who plan to leave said they are not sure what they will do next. “This wasn’t my career plan—I came to the NIH thinking I’d be able to grow within this agency and do good,” the scientific review officer said. One thing she cannot easily do anytime soon is return to the federal government: If employees who take the buyout resume working for the federal government within five years, they have to pay it back.
A small consolation, though, is that the agency she is leaving does not feel like the same one she joined. “Given that we’re not funding so much important science at this point,” she said, “it’s hard to imagine the work you do is going to matter anyway.”
Meanwhile, those who are rejecting the buyouts on principle are bracing for the fact that they could wind up being fired anyway. “I hope I do not get let go,” one of the CDC researchers said, “but if I do, I don’t worry about myself as much as I worry about who will do the work if we are gone.”
