Good evening. I'm Jeff Bennett. And I'm Omna Nawaz. On the news hour tonight, mass firings begin at government health agencies, including people in key leadership positions. As the window narrows to find survivors of the Myanmar quake, aid groups warn of the next threat, the overwhelming need for food, water and health care.

And how a decades-old effort to provide cheap rice to Haiti has made it difficult for the nation to produce its own.

We can't ignore the more than 5 million Haitian people, so half of the country that is facing high levels of food insecurity.

Welcome to the News Hour. The Trump administration began terminating thousands of staff and purging some of the top leaders today at the Department of Health and Human Services.

That included several key agencies, including the FDA, the CDC, and the National Institutes of Health.

Hundreds of HHS employees waited in line this morning, some for as long as an hour,

to get into the building and find out if they still had a job.

Between layoffs and buyouts, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he plans to fire

about 20,000 workers.

Matthew Herper is following all of this for stat news and joins us now. So,

Matt, fill in the picture about the scope of what's happening here, the range of staffers who

are being cut. Oh, it's very, very broad. I mean, in the CDC, we're talking tobacco control,

injury prevention, workplace safety,

birth defects, reproductive health, basically everything that is not infectious disease.

And at the FDA, the cuts are, I think, a lot deeper than a lot of people expected.

People who review new medical products, the people who actually look at a new drug or device mostly seem to have been

safe, but a lot of expertise late last week before the layoffs, the top vaccine official,

also in charge of gene therapy and the blood supply was removed. Today, a director of the

office of new drugs and the head of the Tobacco Center were removed.

Several former FDA commissioners expressed concern, including Scott Gottlieb, who was

FDA commissioner under the Trump administration, worrying about a return to delays in drug

approvals, and Robert Caliph saying that the FDA, as we know,

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