The U.S. Food and Drug Administration earlier this month fired dozens of staffers in its Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) responsible for going after retailers who sell unauthorized products.
Now it’s begging them to come back.
Senior FDA officials asked laid-off employees in recent days to temporarily return after mass cuts decimated the agency’s ability to penalize retailers that sell cigarettes and vapes to minors, four federal health officials familiar with the matter said.
The scramble followed HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s termination of roughly 10,000 employees, which included everyone in the FDA office charged with preparing and seeking fines against stores that repeatedly violate a ban on selling tobacco to customers under 21, Politico reports.
The FDA typically files more than 100 complaints a week seeking so-called civil money penalties against retailers, the officials said. But after the April 1 mass firings carried out across the Department of Health and Human Services, that operation ground to a halt, effectively eradicating the agency’s main weapon against illegal tobacco sales.
“You could not have done a better job of eliminating tobacco enforcement than by doing this,” said one of the officials, who were granted anonymity for fear of retaliation. “It was the perfect pinpoint strike.”
“It’s a prescription for allowing retailers to roll the dice and sell to minors with less concern that they will ever be caught,” Mitch Zeller, who ran the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products for nearly a decade before retiring in 2022, said of the cuts. “Everybody agrees that retailers should not sell to minors — it doesn’t get any more red, white and blue than this program.”
Top FDA officials have yet to lay out a long-term plan for ensuring oversight of retailers’ tobacco sales.
But in the interim, senior leaders are seeking volunteers among those who Kennedy fired to return from administrative leave and help maintain continuity until they’re officially terminated on June 2.
As of Friday, more than two dozen staffers had agreed to return, a development one of the officials attributed in part to workers’ fears of being denied severance benefits if they refused.
Though some senior FDA officials within the Center for Tobacco Products are still trying to get the office fully reinstated, others have warned returning staffers that there is likely no path to being permanently rehired.
“There was no workforce planning in advance of this,” said the first official. “There was no continuity planning.”
It remains unclear why HHS gutted the office focused on civil penalties, which is known within FDA’s tobacco enforcement apparatus as the Division of Business Operations. The Center for Tobacco Products is funded entirely by user fees paid by industry, meaning the terminations won’t create any taxpayer savings. Instead, officials said, it may end up costing money; the fines that the FDA collects from retailers are funneled directly to the federal treasury.
