Over the past week, thousands of federal employees at the Department of Health and Human Services

were waiting for the hammer to drop. They knew that some kind of announcement, likely a layoff,

was coming. Then, on Tuesday, it happened. People were waking up to emails in their inbox saying that they no longer have a job.

They're being placed on leave.

McKenna Kelly writes about politics for Wired.

And the other thing is that, you know, when you're at some of these offices, specifically

that are HHS offices in places like Cincinnati or Pittsburgh, people don't

necessarily live in those cities and they do a lot of commuting. And so people show up to these

buildings, they badge in and their badge doesn't let them in, right? And a lot of people ended up

finding out that way. So people were actually walking up to the building, like putting their pass out and nothing?

Yep, nothing.

McKenna also heard from workers who had their badge access mistakenly turned off or mistakenly left on.

It's all part of a plan to cut some 10,000 employees from jobs at HHS, the Centers for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health,

and more through large-scale reductions in force, or RIFs.

But within HHS and its smaller agencies, no one seems to know how large the RIFs will be.

A lot of these workers at these agencies are still trying to crowdsource exactly what

every agency at HHS looks like because they haven't really heard anything from their managers or

leadership. And they're still awaiting, you know, marching orders for what happens going forward.

How quickly do you think Americans are going to feel some of these cuts?

That's the thing that hit me this week reporting on this. One of the things that one of my

sources pointed out to me on Tuesday in the hours after these emails went out was that,

especially at the CDC, a lot of these are like people who quietly make the world work,

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