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.
By Adam Cancryn and Lauren Gardner, Politico
April 14, 2025- The Food and Drug Administration earlier this month fired dozens of staffers responsible for going after retailers who illegally sell tobacco to minors.
Now it’s begging them to come back.
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.
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.”
The cuts prompted a sprint by the few remaining officials to seek extensions for the active complaints against retailers slated to go before the HHS board charged with reviewing them, another one of the officials said. And inside the FDA, they raised fears about the agency’s ability to continue enforcing the tobacco sales laws that health experts credit for helping drive an extended decline in youth smoking.
Tobacco use among middle and high school students hit the lowest point in a quarter-century in 2024, according to the National Youth Tobacco Survey.
Without aggressive federal oversight, stores would face far less incentive to turn away underage buyers. That could open the door to a reversal in youth tobacco use rates, experts said, undercutting the fight against chronic disease that Kennedy has vowed to make the centerpiece of his agenda. The civil penalties office also served as a key tool in combating growing sales of illicit vapes.
People who smoke cigarettes, use e-cigarettes or other tobacco products primarily begin before they turn 18, research shows, elevating their risk for a range of chronic diseases like lung cancer and heart disease.
“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.
In a statement, HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said that all laid-off employees may be asked to work temporarily until their government service ends on June 2.
“This decision is focused on ensuring that the transition is as seamless as possible, minimizing any disruption to the agency’s mission and operations, Nixon wrote. “HHS fully supports this approach, which aims to maintain public health services while managing the reorganization process effectively.”
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.
Kennedy, who has singled out smoking as particularly detrimental to Americans’ health, argued in a recent CBS News interview that all the jobs eliminated across HHS were either administrative or deemed redundant.
“In some cases, we cut programs, but we only did that when we consolidated them into another program,” he said. “So the task will continue, their mission will continue. The people are still there for the most part.”
Yet within the FDA, the officials said the cuts effectively collapsed its tobacco enforcement operation. The agency’s process consists of three stages: A warning letter sent to a retailer after its first offense, followed by civil penalties for subsequent offenses, with a ban on all tobacco sales reserved for the most egregious violators.
Kennedy’s cuts spared the teams that handle warning letters and the complete bans. Indeed, the FDA is still posting warning letters to purveyors of tobacco products.
But without a well-staffed office to seek fines against stores for repeated sales to minors, the agency won’t have the capacity to follow up on retailers who ignore the warning letters — or to build the cases necessary to shut down the worst offenders.
