The head of the Food and Drug Administration has repeatedly claimed in recent interviews that no scientists have been laid off at his agency, but one of the scientists in a food safety lab shuttered by the FDA’s cuts says he is either “blatantly lying” or “out of touch.”
“There were no layoffs to scientists or food inspectors,” FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary told CNN on Wednesday. Makary previously said in an April 17 interview with Megyn Kelly that there “were not cuts to scientists, or reviewers, or inspectors. Absolutely none.”
“That just made me so mad, that he said no scientists were cut,” said one laid-off FDA scientist, a chemist who had worked for the agency for years.
Nearly all of the scientists at food safety laboratories run by the FDA in the San Francisco and Chicago areas received layoff notices this month, four laid-off chemists and microbiologists said. The scientists, who were not authorized to speak publicly, spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The San Francisco lab, opened during the first Trump administration, had been ramping up testing of infant formula. Its closure has now reduced the agency’s baby formula testing capacity by a quarter, at a time when Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for stepped up testing, laid-off scientists said.
“Do you know and you’re blatantly lying? Or do you not know, and you’re just that out of touch,” the chemist said of Makary’s comments.
An FDA spokesperson said that the labs were planned to be decommissioned by the agency before the reorganization by the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency and Kennedy that resulted in the layoffs. The spokesperson declined to comment on the discrepancy between Makary’s remarks and the layoffs.
Most of the staff at those labs have not been back in the building since April 1, when they packed up their belongings.
Like other laid-off employees at the FDA, the scientists received a “reduction in force” notice that they were being put on leave and would be let go from the FDA on June 2. The letters said that their “duties have been identified as either unnecessary or virtually identical to duties being performed elsewhere in the agency.”
For now, a handful of employees say they have been asked back to work for a few more weeks, but only to start the process of shuttering their former labs, disposing of samples and supplies.
They were previously responsible for everything from researching the safety of new techniques of food processing to investigating food products for contamination with toxic metals.
Scientists in the San Francisco lab had been the only ones able to test for bird flu contamination in pet food in the agency’s network, multiple FDA officials said. The lab’s scientists were the only ones with the expertise and specialized “biocontainment infrastructure” to do the testing, a memo shared with CBS News circulated among agency officials said.
Scientists in that lab had also been responsible for major food safety investigations in recent years, given its proximity to major agricultural producers in the region. More than half of the fresh produce in the U.S. is grown in Northern and Central California.
Outbreak investigators would often rush samples back to the lab for testing, multiple laid-off scientists recounted, sometimes requiring staff in the lab to work through the weekends and holidays.
“Every day they were getting samples, five or six samples a day. During the onion outbreak, oh my goodness, there were onions everywhere. The whole lab smelled like onions,” one laid-off scientist in the San Francisco lab recalled of their work during the 2024 investigation of contaminated onions used in McDonald’s Quarter Pounders.
The FDA had also recently poured tens of millions of dollars into moving and updating the San Francisco lab to a new location, scientists and officials said. It had a ribbon-cutting near the end of the first Trump administration.
FDA officials at the time touted the lab as critical for a range of food safety testing efforts. It had a lab set up to be free of any metal, needed for advanced investigations into products that could be contaminated with toxic heavy metals like lead and cadmium.
The agency had also purchased new technology for the lab to test food for unapproved color dyes that had been added to products, which could pose a safety risk.
“FDA scientists will be able to process samples of food and other products and to detect dangerous components, like heavy metals, with extraordinary sensitivity: in the parts-per-trillion range,” Dr. Amy Abernethy, one of the agency’s top officials during the end of the first Trump administration, said in 2019 at the lab’s reopening.
Scientists there had been preparing to ramp up testing of baby formula as part of “Operation Stork Speed,” ordered by Kennedy earlier this year to increase checks for heavy metal contaminants. They were also working on launching the capacity to analyze the nutrients in baby formula, which only one other lab in the FDA’s network is equipped to do.
“We have a lot of brand new equipment that’s sitting on the bench waiting to be used. We have to do massive verification, validation before we can start analysis. So we were in the middle of that. Now, all of those brand new equipment will go to waste,” one laid-off scientist said.
Multiple FDA scientists said they estimated it would likely take millions of dollars and months of work to formally shut down the lab, let alone to transfer their workload to the FDA’s remaining scientists.
“The other labs, they are overwhelmed with some samples because we’re not doing the testing anymore,” one laid-off scientist said.
