Welcome to the NewsHour. The Trump administration began terminating thousands of staff and purging some of the top leaders today at the Department of Health and Human Services. That included several key agencies, including the FDA, the CDC, and the National Institutes of Health.

Hundreds of HHS employees waited in line this morning, some for as long as an hour, to get into the building and find out if they still had a job.

Between layoffs and buyouts, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he plans to fire about 20,000 workers.

Matthew Herper is following all of this for stat news and joins us now.

So, Matt, fill in the picture about the scope of what's happening here, the range of staffers who are being cut.

Oh, it's very, very broad.

I mean, in the CDC, we're talking tobacco control, injury prevention, workplace safety, birth defects, reproductive health,

basically everything that is not infectious disease. And at the FDA, the cuts are, I think,

a lot deeper than a lot of people expected. People who review new medical products, the people

who actually look at a new drug or device mostly seem to have been safe, but a lot of expertise

late last week before the layoffs, the top vaccine official, also in charge of gene

therapy and the blood supply was removed. Today, a director with the office of new drugs

and the head of the Tobacco Center were removed.

Several former FDA commissioners expressed concern, including Scott Gottlieb, who was

FDA commissioner under the Trump administration, worrying about a return to delays in drug

approvals, and Robert Caliph saying that the FDA, as we know, it is finished with most of the leaders

with institutional knowledge and deep understanding of product development and safety no longer

employed.

Well, the HHS Secretary said in a statement that the firings were intended to reduce what he

called bureaucratic sprawl.

HHS is among the largest federal agencies in terms of

spending, given the kind of work that it does. Prior to this, had bloat or bureaucratic

...