Trump Cuts to Hobble Agencies If Hard-to-Replace Staff Exit (1)

This week’s takeover of USAID stoked concerns for the job security of skilled scientists, attorneys, and other experts across the government as President Donald Trump moves to shrink the federal workforce.

Staffers at the US Agency for International Development, who are the government’s most highly educated, were unable to enter headquarters Monday following Trump’s moves to effectively shut down the agency that fights starvation, epidemics, and poverty. In addition, five USAID implementing partners furloughed more than 1,800 contracting staff in recent days, while others had their hours severely cut, according to an aid official who was granted anonymity to speak freely.

“The sector is being actively destroyed,” the aid official said. “This is a very specialized industry and we’re going to lose people and institutions who understand how this industry works. That knowledge, accumulated over decades, cannot be replaced.”

The administration’s actions—including executive orders ending remote work arrangements, stripping legal protections from career staff, and terminating federal positions related to diversity, equity, and inclusion—fuel concerns for the departures of the most experienced civil servants who stay current with advances in science and technology, according to former government workers.

“They often are specialists in their field and they’re hard to replace,” said Howard Sklamberg, a former director of compliance at the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. “Think of somebody evaluating a drug for kidney cancer—a nephrologist—who is an expert in kidneys. You can’t replace that person with somebody off the street.”

More than 40,000 employees across the government, about 2% of the federal workforce, had signed up for an offer to quit their jobs in exchange for a deferred resignation deal that includes payment through September, Bloomberg News reported Wednesday. Trump’s offer expires at the end of the day Thursday.

Federal workers have proportionally more college degrees and advanced degrees than the overall civilian workforce, according to a study published in January by the Pew Research Center citing data as of March 2024. The looming shutdown of USAID would gut the government’s most highly educated agency: Two-thirds of USAID’s 4,675 workers hold a master’s degree, doctorate, or other advanced degree, according to the study.

‘Losses for the Agency’

Agencies such as the FDA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the US Patent and Trademark Office rely on skilled workers to carry out missions such as overseeing food, drugs, and medical devices; approving patent applications; and keeping the air and water clean.

The Office of Personnel Management reported in March 2024 that of the over 2 million federal employees at cabinet level agencies, 546,585 hold bachelor’s degrees, 355,089 have master’s degrees, and 79,095 hold doctoral degrees. Large independent agencies such as the EPA possessed 7,076 workers with a doctoral degree, the data showed.

The government also relies on such employees to keep up with advancements in the areas they regulate, which is already a challenge for them, according to the US Government Accountability Office.

“As therapies have gotten more sophisticated, does FDA have the expertise and its staff to evaluate those therapies?” said Sklamberg, who’s now a partner at Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP. “If a lot of those people leave, it could create a problem with getting drugs approved and evaluated.”

With Trump’s return to the White House, top leaders at the FDA who resigned or retired included the director of Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, Patrizia Cavazzoni, and principal deputy commissioner, Namandjé N. Bumpus. Troy Tazbaz, head of the FDA’s Digital Health Center of Excellence, announced his departure on Jan. 31.

“The couple of leaders that we’ve lost are really important people who carry a lot of institutional knowledge and also scientific knowledge,” former FDA Commissioner Robert Califf said in an exit interview in December. “There’s no question those are important losses for the agency.”

Trump’s vision includes shrinking the federal workforce and ensuring government workers are “reliable, loyal, trustworthy, and who strive for excellence in their daily work.” He fired Justice Department attorneys who played a role in prosecuting the Jan. 6 rioters.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s pick to run Health and Human Services, said in a Senate confirmation hearing Jan. 30 that he would seek to remove “corrupt” scientists in the agency, and the good scientists are “devoted to empirical methodology, to evidence-based science.” The Senate Finance Committee on Tuesday voted to advance Kennedy’s nomination to the Senate floor.

Fueling Shortfalls

Some agencies already face chronic understaffing that predates the Trump administration. For example, the EPA is required by Congress to assess the safety of various chemicals, but the agency has long said it doesn’t have enough scientists to meet its deadlines.

“If you create a climate where you’ve scared everybody off and you can’t hire career staff, well, you might have all sorts of really cool ideas, but you’re not gonna get them implemented,” said David Fischer, who served in the EPA’s chemicals office in the first Trump administration.

The EPA’s criminal enforcement program has 180 special agents nationwide—a step up from the first Trump presidency, but still too low to be effective, according to David Uhlmann, who led the team under President Joe Biden.

“Just think about how many law enforcement officials there are in just a small town police department,” Uhlmann said. “EPA has an extraordinarily small program, and frankly, it should be much bigger.”

The FDA has also struggled in recent years to meet tasks due to its limited workforce capacity, such as executing food safety inspections and clinical checkups.

The GAO reported in January that the FDA hasn’t met its mandated targets for domestic and foreign food safety inspections since fiscal 2018. Inspections to ensure the quality and integrity of clinical research for drug approvals also decreased in recent years due to challenges in recruiting and retaining investigators, according to the federal watchdog.

“The concern is that real experts leave—such as the experts in cell and gene therapy, the experts in the design of clinical trials,” a former senior FDA official said. “It’s the experts that constitute the heart of the FDA, and those are the people that you really don’t want to lose, and that we as consumers can’t afford to lose.”