More than 10% of the staff working for the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration were fired this month as part of the government-wide cuts to recently hired federal workers ordered by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, task force.
The cuts amounted to around 100 probationary workers, multiple current and former federal health officials told CBS News, and affected multiple teams around the department, ranging from recently hired directors of SAMHSA’s regional offices to staff working on projects related to the 988 hotline for people facing mental health crises, which the agency oversees.
At the agency’s communications team, whose work is aimed at raising awareness about the 988 hotline, a SAMHSA employee said a quarter of their team had been lost over the last month.
“People on the federal staff who oversee and are working to raise awareness of 988 nationally are the people who are gone,” the employee, Stacey Palosky, posted on LinkedIn.
Officials predicted the impact of the cuts, like at many other health agencies that administer large swaths of grants and external contracts, would likely not be immediately felt. Instead, they said the cuts would translate to a long-term erosion of SAMHSA’s ability to conduct oversight, a slowdown in grant approvals and bogging down updates to guidance.
Much of the work in some parts of the agency is made up of awarding and tracking taxpayer dollars awarded to drug addiction and mental health treatment programs.
That includes funding for the call centers that make up the 988 hotline, run largely by state and local governments around the country, as well as the nonprofit that administers it.
Federal health officials said they also feared the cuts at the agency would herald a return of the plummeting morale under the first Trump administration, which followed a steep reduction in the agency’s size.
The workforce at SAMHSA dropped to a low of 376 employees in 2020, according to records tallied by the Partnership for Public Service, down from a high of 553 in 2014.
Over the same time, survey scores of employee satisfaction at SAMHSA dropped to a record low of 27 out of 100, far below the average for federal agencies.
Employee satisfaction scores began to recover in 2020, reaching a record high of 81.5 by 2023, above the average. The size of the SAMHSA workforce also grew to 633 by 2023.
Most federal health agencies have also faced firings in recent weeks, largely handed down by either termination letters this past weekend from the Department of Health of Human Services or as a result of severed contracts.
Agencies losing contractors and recently-hired workers include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, and the Administration for Children and Families.
Some agencies initially slated for steep cuts later secured exemptions for many health agency workers, including the Indian Health Service.
It is not clear how many total workers were ultimately cut from the Department of Health and Human Services. A spokesperson for the department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At SAMHSA, officials remaining at the agency said the firings were frustrating, undoing hard-won hires in some cases for needed positions.
One health official warned of a repeat from the “doom loop” that plagued the agency during the first Trump administration, where most of the highest performing workers fled SAMHSA for jobs in the private sector, feeding a drop in morale.
Some staff remained because they were committed to public service, the official said. But many others remained because they were stuck in their jobs at SAMHSA, either because of personal circumstances or because they were unable to get hired elsewhere.
“Last time it took them two or three years to induce the doom loop. This time they have done it in less than a month,” the official said.
- In:
- United States Department of Health and Human Services
- DOGE
- Trump Administration
- Mental Health
Add Comment