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This is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato along with Floralickman.

It was no April Fool's joke.

Thousands of federal health workers woke up on April 1st to find that they had been

fired or laid off. Scientists and civil servants at the FDA, CDC, NIH were let go as part of Robert

F. Kennedy Jr.'s pledge to cut jobs at the country's most important disease fighting agencies.

Here with more of that story, as well as some other

news headlines of the week, is Umer Erfan, senior correspondent at Vox and Washington. Umair, welcome back.

Hi, Ira, thanks for having me. Nice to have you back. All right into this. Umar, tell us what happened.

What was going on in those layoffs? Well, as you noted, a lot of workers got a very surprising message or found out when they

were locked out of their computers that they were laid off.

So these layoffs affected about 10,000 workers at the Department of Health and Human Services.

And this comes after 10,000 job cuts that had already happened or resignations from the earlier rounds of cuts.

And so this includes job reductions at agencies like the Centers for Disease Control,

the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services,

and the National Institutes of Health.

So affecting a lot of different functions across the agency.

Who are some of the big names that were let go?

Yeah, I think that's kind of one of the unusual things here, is like these were not the

probationary workers that were laid off.

These were more senior staff, including agency heads.

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