FDA tech officials complied with DOGE’s requests for data. The staff reductions still came.

Tech officials at the Food and Drug Administration — like many at other agencies across the Department of Health and Human Services — have been inundated with work on internal data requests related to the Department of Government Efficiency and Trump’s numerous executive orders since the beginning of his administration. 

Those requests, known as “data calls,” sometimes came with tight deadlines, necessitated working into the weekend, and could be vague or inaccurate, said three FDA officials who spoke to FedScoop on the condition of anonymity to be more candid. The calls FDA received included, but weren’t limited to, queries about technology projects, acquisitions and systems considered essential or critical. 

But despite their best efforts to provide that data and work with the current administration, FDA tech officials who spent the last few months working to provide that information were still among the many included in HHS’s April 1 reduction in force. Not only was it unexpected, but the sources said they now worry the staffing cuts have put the agency’s IT infrastructure at risk. 

“It’s like we did everything right and we still got screwed,” an FDA source said. 

Within the FDA’s Office of Digital Transformation, the chief information officer and nearly the entire executive leadership team were eliminated in the reductions, the FDA sources said. Most of those officials were placed on administrative leave until June 2, when they’ll be officially separated from the department. In total, an estimated 40% of the staff in the FDA tech office is gone as a part of the “Fork in the Road” directive, early retirement options, or the RIF earlier this month. 

Additionally, a significant portion of the roughly 600 workers who were part of the digital transformation team on Jan. 20 were retirement eligible by the end of 2025, the sources said. With the environment the cuts have created, sources expect more people will exercise their retirement option, leaving the office with even fewer officials.  

Disrupting the IT teams at the agency not only puts key important information housed within the agency — such as company trade secrets — at risk, it impacts all of FDA’s efforts to safeguard food, drugs and other products because that work relies on data and technology, sources said. 

The reductions came as part of HHS’s plan to “streamline” department functions by cutting roughly 10,000 workers and consolidating divisions. A leaked draft of HHS’s 2026 budget proposal last week outlined more specific aspirations for that reorganization, including a new departmentwide Office of the Chief Technology Officer that would house the HHS CIO. According to Bloomberg, Clark Minor, a former Palantir employee, was selected by the Trump administration as the department CIO, but he had introduced himself to people at the agency as the CTO, sources said.

That document, which was marked “pre-decisional,” was first reported by the Washington Post and a copy was independently obtained by FedScoop. Under the draft, $9 million would be provided to consolidate all of the functions and existing staff from the Assistant Secretary for Technology Policy, which was created last year, to the new CTO office to “continue carrying out mission critical functions.” 

In an emailed statement to FedScoop, an HHS official confirmed plans to centralize IT. “Under Secretary Kennedy’s vision to streamline HHS to better serve the American people, the IT offices within the Department will be consolidated. The work of these offices will continue,” the statement said.

The department, however, didn’t respond to FedScoop’s numerous other questions, such as how RIF decisions were made, how many IT officials have been impacted, and what Minor’s official title is.

Essential systems

FDA sources told FedScoop they were concerned that one of the more recent DOGE data calls on essential and mission critical systems — which linked systems and IT staff who maintained them together — appeared to have been used to get rid of workers during the reduction in force, despite the information not painting a full picture of what’s important.

Officials weren’t provided with a good definition of what essential meant, and determining what actually fell under that category was difficult because key systems can vary depending on each team’s work, the sources said. 

There also wasn’t a way to account for supporting functions that essential systems rely on, the sources said. Nonetheless, supporting teams that weren’t listed as the owners of essential applications during that call were eliminated in the RIF. 

“It’s almost like they kept the head, but they chopped off the rest of the body,” one source said.

What’s more, the staffing cuts came after some hope among FDA officials in the tech office that working with this administration might provide them with the ability to make progress on their ongoing efforts to streamline the agency’s IT functions, sources said. 

The digital transformation team had several positive meetings with the DOGE liaison at the FDA as well as leaders at the agency and the department levels, the sources said, and even offered plans to consolidate and help reduce costs that involved converting contracting talent into federal talent to save money. There wasn’t interest in those plans, however, and what the team ended up with were instructions to fill out a spreadsheet with mission-critical systems. 

One source said that in hindsight, they wished they’d maybe even pushed back more instead of trying to work with the current administration and find those areas for opportunity. 

Departmentwide impact

Other tech offices within HHS agencies and at the department-level have also faced cuts under the Trump administration, sources said. For example, HHS’s chief information security officer was reassigned during the RIF, and its CIO, Jennifer Wendel, is expected to leave soon. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s chief information officer is on administrative leave, the sources said.

According to the sources, many officials reassigned within the department were placed in the Indian Health Service, forcing them to relocate to one of the division’s offices across the U.S or leave. 

Some sources voiced concern over HHS’s moves to consolidate IT at the department level, which they said would be hard to achieve without the people they RIFd and could fail to account for the intricacies of each agency’s needs. There also aren’t details about how that consolidation would work. 

One FDA source used the example of data, saying that while some data — such as information related to patients, treatments, and procedures — might be common across HHS agencies, other data is more mission-specific. FDA, for instance, might be the only agency that relies on data needed to generate something like a 483, which is a record used during the inspection process for products regulated by the agency. That level of information would never be a priority for the HHS level, however, they said.

Another source with knowledge of IT operations elsewhere in HHS described the way the RIFs were conducted as showing a lack of experience in managing complex organizations. The source, who was also granted anonymity to speak more freely, said that before the RIF, they hadn’t seen efforts to actually engage with people who led some of the eliminated functions, and there didn’t appear to be any rationale for who was eliminated. 

Ultimately, the shake-up could leave the department vulnerable to breaches. In the current environment, where talent is gone and it’s not clear who is leading, that source said, HHS’s ability to respond to a potential cybersecurity breach has been diminished.