FDA_CVM_office_May_2025

Photo by Siobhan DeLancey

The Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine occupies rented office space in Rockville, Maryland, that appears slated for redevelopment. Some employees have expressed concern that the CVM will relocate outside the region, forcing them either to move or quit.

This week, scores of employees at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine were due to receive final paychecks after spending 60 days on administrative leave.

They were among 143 CVM staffers, many of them veterinarians, who lost their jobs in April. They worked in avian influenza response and policy development. They communicated with the public, media and industry. They fulfilled Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. The Office of the Director and the Office of Management were eliminated. The chief veterinarian and principal deputy director were laid off.

Soon after, about 40 from the director's office were reinstated. They were initially brought back to temporarily cover their duties while the department sorted out how to move forward without them. They have since been told their reinstatements will continue. An additional handful covering limited management functions were reinstated this week. 

The fate of the rest is still to be determined. An appeals court ruled in late May that those workers must continue to be paid while a lawsuit charging that President Donald Trump strayed beyond his legal and constitutional powers moves through the judicial system. The White House reportedly has appealed the decision to the Supreme Court.

These developments followed layoffs in February, when most CVM employees in their first one to two years of service were fired. Some of the probationary-status employees were rehired, reportedly because they had specialized expertise. At the same time, countless longstanding employees accepted enticements to resign.

The firings, rehirings, retirement offers and administrative leave periods are part of a government-wide effort by the administration to shrink the federal bureaucracy.

The FDA has not released the total number of employees who have been cut or resigned since the inauguration on Jan. 20, nor specifics about who has been reinstated.

To understand the scale of the changes and uncertainty and their potential impact on veterinary medicine, the VIN News Service talked to a past CVM director and the recently departed chief of staff, as well as four current or former employees. The employees asked not to be identified because they feared retribution from the administration for speaking to the press. This article is reported by a former CVM spokesperson, who was a journalist before joining the FDA in 2004 and who took an early retirement offer in March.

VIN News contacted Dr. Timothy Schell, acting CVM director, for comment. He referred the inquiry to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) media office, which did not respond by deadline, six days later.

Small center, big mission

The FDA is comprised of 14 offices, six centers and one program, according to a May 28 agency organization chart. Dr. Steven Solomon, who was the CVM director from 2017 to 2022 and is now retired, describes the CVM as the FDA's "smallest center" but with the "broadest mission, protecting human and animal health."

He explained that while the FDA has separate centers to regulate drugs, medical devices, biologic products and food for human populations, the CVM covers all of that ground for nonhuman animals, apart from some biologics that are regulated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

"Plus, there's no CDC for animals," he said, referring to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "So, CVM fills that role by investigating animal illnesses related to foods and drugs."

Current and former employees say that with the staffing cuts, the CVM's primary responsibilities — evaluating the safety and effectiveness of animal drugs before and after they reach the market and ensuring the safety of animal food — will be compromised, potentially resulting in products that are less safe or effective.

Sources also expressed concern that One Health initiatives and zoonotic disease surveillance will be negatively impacted.

Chaotic cuts to an understaffed agency

The CVM began the year below strength.

"We started the year already down by about 20% [in staffing]," one source with knowledge said, explaining that hiring freezes, attrition and planned retirements had already squeezed the workforce. "Now, I'd say CVM is easily down 34% of its staff."

Solomon described CVM as a "lean center," with a lot of people wearing multiple hats out of necessity.

While he conceded that there is always room for improved efficiency, he said, "When you make wholesale changes in an already lean program, you're not making it more efficient. It takes people with intimate knowledge of those programs to manage costs and have discussions on what to cut."

That's not what happened, based on multiple news reports and CVM sources.

"We weren't given the opportunity for input to choose" where to best make cuts to maintain continuity of the programs, a manager said. "Nor [were we] given a list of people who had accepted one of the offers to leave, so we couldn't plan."

Former CVM Chief of Staff Dr. Rosemary Earley, a veterinarian who resigned in May, described the process of firing and then temporarily rehiring staff as wholly inefficient.

While internet technology and timekeeping staff were asked to continue working until June 2, other functions, such as training, budget negotiation, contract administration, and even travel for pre-approval inspections of animal drug manufacturing facilities, were left "paralyzed, frozen," Earley said. "There [was] no path forward on who was going to assume those functions."

Approximately 40 employees in the Office of the Director were reinstated after HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received sharp questions from lawmakers regarding FOIA staff and bird flu response activities in the days after the layoffs. However, multiple reinstated employees consulted for this article said they were told that their position descriptions had been abolished, and their current work responsibilities remain unclear.

"I don't even know what our mission is anymore," one veterinarian said.

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Photo by Siobhan DeLancey

Members of the FDA Alumni Association made and placed signs at the CVM's Rockville, Maryland, office in support of employees.

Several employees reported hearing from superiors that they had been reinstated only because all employees in the office were classified under the same administrative code, making it impossible for the administration to be selective about whom to bring back. Communications, consumer education and policy staff, which were eliminated in all other FDA centers, are among those brought back at the CVM. They wonder if the reprieve will be short-lived.

Furthering uncertainty about the future of CVM is its physical location. The center currently occupies rented space in an office park in Rockville, Maryland. Signs on the property indicate it is slated for redevelopment, and employees said they expect to be out by September. The FDA headquarters, 10 miles away in Silver Spring, is already crowded, as reported in March by the Associated Press.

Some employees expressed concern that the office would be moved out of the region, citing statements by Trump during his campaign. In an address in March 2023, he promised "to move parts of the sprawling federal bureaucracies to new locations outside the Washington swamp." If that happens with CVM, some remaining employees might quit rather than relocate. "People are so uncertain about their future that they're looking to leave," Solomon said.

Meanwhile, there's a hiring freeze in place throughout the federal civilian workforce that's currently scheduled to run through July 15, at which time, the administration will institute what it calls a "merit hiring plan." According to an April 17 White House memorandum, "agencies will be able to hire no more than one employee for every four employees that depart from federal service (with appropriate immigration, law enforcement, and public safety exceptions)."

How the 1-to-4 criterion will be applied remains to be seen. Employees speculate that if new hires are focused in areas the administration considers as higher priorities, such as human drug or device review, CVM's numbers could continue to dwindle.

Future of drug evaluation

The gaps in coverage worry Earley, the former CVM chief of staff, who pointed out that the animal drug pre-market evaluation function, although largely supported by user fees paid by industry, lost new scientists in the probationary phases of their careers.

Drug companies pay user fees to offset the salaries of drug reviewers (veterinarians, animal scientists, specialists in manufacturing technology, toxicologists and the like) in exchange for predictable review deadlines.

With fewer scientists to review applications facing mandated deadlines to complete those reviews, Earley believes there will be reshuffling, causing consequences in other programs.

"I anticipate people will be reassigned from roles where they focused on adverse events," she said, referring to drug and food safety issues. "We already had a very limited capacity to respond [to crisis situations], and now we don't have a way to backfill those vacancies."

The future of FDA user fee programs themselves is uncertain because Kennedy has criticized them as permitting drug companies to unduly influence regulators and suggested eliminating them.

Given the unpredictability around the user-fee programs, Solomon predicted that drug companies would be less likely to invest in cutting-edge or first-of-its-kind treatments needed by veterinarians and would instead focus on "the easiest, speediest approvals that are the most likely to make money and recoup investment in research and development."

Earley agreed, saying, "There's just not going to be the same kind of innovation we've been seeing over the last several years."

Concerns about communications and One Health

External communications programs in CVM and across the FDA were eliminated on April 1, effectively stopping the flow of public information about new product approvals, safety-related labeling changes, emerging safety issues and recalls of foods, drugs and medical devices used in veterinary medicine. CVM has issued only four CVM Updates, its main communication vehicle, since Jan. 20. In all of 2024, it issued 55.

CVM typically emailed notifications of new animal drug approvals and safety-related labeling changes to subscribers at the beginning of each month but hasn't sent any for May or June to date. The recent animal drug approvals page has not been updated since April 8. According to a source with knowledge of recent approvals, there have been 11 since the last update.

Public communications also can protect consumers and pets.

In the past, the ability of the CVM to communicate about product issues had a direct effect on companies' willingness to recall products, Solomon said, explaining that "firms are sometimes hesitant to take a product off the market because of financial impact." He said CVM-authored safety notices "are a valuable leverage tool in those instances when firms don't want to take that step."

Solomon also worries that One Health programs, which focus on the intertwined nature of human, animal and environmental health, will get lost in the shuffle, as an ever leaner, demoralized staff struggles to keep up.

He listed a raft of bigger-picture, but perhaps less publicly recognized, activities that could be curbed or lost. They include monitoring the integrity of the food supply during natural disasters, such as hurricanes; working on translational medicine, such as cancer drugs for dogs that parlay into human clinical trials; and tracking zoonotic pathogens like the virus that causes bird flu.

The fiscal year 2026 budget request for the Animal Drugs and Foods Program — essentially the CVM budget plus funds for inspections — is just under $233.8 million. This represents a decrease of almost $48 million from 2025.  With the loss of expertise and funding, will the CVM be able to fulfill its mission? Solomon wonders. "I keep hearing Secretary Kennedy say the agency has to do more with less," he said, "but the fact is, they're going to be doing less with less."