The number of workers terminated by the Trump administration at the National Institutes of Health has been revised to 1,165, according to an NIH internal email seen by Reuters on Sunday, down from an initial 1,500.
The email, sent to senior NIH leaders on Saturday night, said some names were removed from the list but new ones may have been added. Affected staff will be placed on administrative leave starting on Monday.
They have received termination letters and will be on administrative leave for four weeks before they are officially terminated, an NIH official told Reuters.
The number accounts for around 6% of the 20,000 people employed by the NIH, an agency overseeing 27 institutes and centers and the top public funder of medical research on everything from vaccines for emerging pandemic threats to targets for new drugs.
It has long been in the crosshairs of newly confirmed Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who said in November he would act quickly to fire 600 people there and replace them all with new hires.
It was unclear if those terminated this week, most of whom were probationary workers let go as part of President Donald Trump’s overhaul of government agencies, included the 600 employees referenced by Kennedy, an avowed vaccine skeptic and critic of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the NIH, agencies now under his watch.
The Trump administration also terminated employees at the FDA on Saturday night, Stat News reported, citing sources.
It wasn’t immediately clear how many FDA employees were affected nor how many parts of the agency may be involved, the report said, adding that some of those cut worked in the FDA’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health.
The FDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment outside regular business hours.
About 5,200 probationary employees across the Department of Health and Human Services were being let go, STAT News reported, amounting to 6% of its 80,000 employees, including those at the FDA, NIH and the CDC, which saw half of its probationary workers terminated on Friday.
The U.S. government began firing thousands of people at multiple agencies on Thursday as Trump and billionaire Elon Musk accelerate their purge of America’s federal bureaucracy. Reuters