The Trump administration's insistence that it's avoiding cutting certain healthcare workers — including those involved with disease response and Medicare — appears to be false, according to a report.
An anonymous official in the administration told Politico last week they were trying to be "thoughtful about critical functions that the government needs to perform."
But not so, laid-off workers told HuffPost.
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Even those "keeping dangerous chemicals out of the food supply, and those on a project to reduce America’s notoriously high maternal mortality rate" are now gone, reported Jonathan Cohn.
Two HHS employees who work on Medicare were given dismissal notices. The sources told HuffPost "plenty more" were cut, including those hired to renegotiate drug prices for Medicare.
"But the idea that this effort is 'thoughtful' seems pretty dubious, given the broad, chaotic way firings have taken place ― and the fact that, as employees told HuffPost, many of the people who lost jobs were working on projects to reduce costs, to guard against fraud or to promote better health outcomes," wrote Cohen.
Trump claimed DOGE's goal was to reduce "waste, fraud, and abuse," but one worker told HuffPost that the cuts are not being made efficiently and will not help save taxpayer dollars.
“If you want to talk about saving money for taxpayers, we were the ones that were ensuring that it actually was budget neutral for the federal government,” that worker said.
Trump tasked Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency initiative with finding what should be cut, resulting in an indiscriminate firing of whole offices.
At the Department of Energy, for example, as many as 350 National Nuclear Security Administration employees were laid off last week, leaving offices vacant for some of the most sensitive nuclear positions. The White House team wanted to bring them back once they realized their mistake, but couldn't find any contact information, NBC News said.
While the U.S. faces a bird flu outbreak, the administration fired those at the Department of Agriculture on Friday who were working on it. DOGE fired those tasked with disease detection, The Independent reported Monday. Like with the Department of Energy, the administration is now scrambling to find those workers to ask them to return.