HHS becomes latest agency to offer employees a $25,000 buyout option

• HHS has joined a growing list of federal agencies offering employees a “voluntary separation offer.” Most of the agency’s 80,000 employees received an email with a $25,000 buyout option, which they have to respond to between next Monday and Friday.
• With an annual budget of $1.7 trillion, HHS is one of the government’s most expensive agencies, responsible for overseeing disease research, food inspection, and Medicare and Medicaid.
• Mass layoffs and buyout offers, which began shortly after President Trump took office in January, were largely spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency.

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The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has joined a growing list of agencies offering most of their employees a buyout option as the Trump administration continues making cuts to the federal workforce. The Associated Press reported Sunday, March 9, that most of HHS’ 80,000 employees received an email with a “voluntary separation offer” worth as much as $25,000.

HHS houses various departments that are responsible for everything from researching diseases and inspecting food to facilitating Medicare and Medicaid operations.

The agency oversees the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, and the Food and Drug Administration. With an annual budget of $1.7 trillion, the Health Department is one of the government’s most expensive agencies to run.

According to the AP, a “broad population of HHS employees” received the email, and will have between Monday, March 10, and Friday, March 14, to respond to the buyout offer. Meanwhile, agency heads across the federal government are expected to submit a proposal for downsizing their workforce to the Trump administration by Thursday, March 13.  

Shortly after being sworn in as health secretary last month, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he had a “list in my head” of public health workers who “made really bad decisions” on nutrition guidelines and would be let go.

Mass layoffs and buyout options, which began shortly after President Donald Trump took office in January, were largely spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was tasked with dramatically reducing government spending.

While DOGE has claimed to have saved the government upwards of $105 billion –– which it reports on its DOGE Live Tracker –– it has simultaneously deleted some of the savings it purported to catch. For instance, DOGE said it saved $1.9 billion when it canceled an IRS contract. However, the recipient of that contract later told the New York Times that its agreement with the IRS was actually canceled last fall, when former President Joe Biden was still in office.

Likewise, Musk made headlines in February when he said that DOGE identified millions of Social Security recipients who were well over the age of 100. The claim also turned out to be false, as computer programmers quickly pointed out that an idiosyncrasy in the coding language used to operate Social Security Administration databases was behind the seemingly wild age discrepancies.