AMNA NAWAZ: Welcome to the "News Hour."

The Trump administration began terminating thousands of staff and purging some of the top leaders today at the Department of Health and Human Services.

That included several key agencies, including the FDA, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health.

GEOFF BENNETT: Hundreds of HHS employees waited in line this morning, some for as long as an hour, to get into the building and find out if they still had a job.

Between layoffs and buyouts, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. says he plans to fire about 20,000 workers.

Matthew Herper is following all of this for STAT News and joins us now.

So, Matt, fill in the picture about the scope of what's happening here, the range of staffers who are being cut.

MATTHEW HERPER, STAT News: Oh, it's very, very broad.

I mean, in the CDC, we're talking tobacco control, injury prevention, workplace safety, birth defects, reproductive health, basically everything that is not infectious disease.

And at the FDA, the cuts are, I think, a lot deeper than a lot of people expected.

People who review new medical products, the people who actually look at a new drug or device, mostly seem to have been safe, but a lot of expertise.

Late last week before the layoffs, the top vaccine official, also in charge of gene therapy and the blood supply was removed.

Today, a director of the Office of New Drugs and the head of the Tobacco Center were removed.

The former -- several former FDA commissioners expressed concern, including Scott Gottlieb, who was FDA commissioner under the Trump administration, worrying about a return to delays in drug approvals.

And Robert Califf saying that the FDA as we know it is finished with most of the leaders, with institutional knowledge and deep understanding of product development and safety no longer employed.

GEOFF BENNETT: Well, the HHS secretary said in a statement that the firings were intended to reduce what he called bureaucratic sprawl.

HHS is among the largest federal agencies in terms of spending, given the kind of work that it does.

Prior to this, had bloat or bureaucratic inefficiencies been an issue that people were focused on?

MATTHEW HERPER: Oh, well, it's certainly a problem and something that anyone who's worked in the agency will tell you that there is a lot of bloat and efficiency and that it can be maddening with all the different fiefdoms in such a large and sometimes bureaucratic agency.

But, I mean, some of the same people, I mean, another former FDA commissioner, Margaret Hamburg, said it was horrifying, thoughtless and very shortsighted, but also pointed out that she had seen similar problems in terms of bloat.

I think a big question here is going to be whether these changes actually do increase efficiency or whether there were some back office or procedural functions that were important to the smooth running of the agency that may be hard to replace.

GEOFF BENNETT: To what extent do these cuts reflect RFK Jr.s' desire to change the government's approach to public health?

MATTHEW HERPER: Well, I think they certainly reflect that.

I mean, the CDC is being refocused very much on infectious disease.

A lot of -- already before this, through the cuts from the Department of Government Efficiency, a lot of those cuts were -- we did see cuts focused on things, including vaccines.

So I think we are starting to see a picture emerging, particularly at the FDA, which people had kind of thought might be insulated from Secretary Kennedy's ideas, that a lot of those are in play, and also a lot of the idea is that this whole agency is not efficient, that it's really beholden to industry, and changes in focus.

I think what Secretary Kennedy means when he talks about food safety, where he's talking about additives, and whereas the FDA is often focused on things like whether you're going to catch diseases from your food, right.

GEOFF BENNETT: Matthew Herper, senior writer with STAT News, thanks for being with us.

MATTHEW HERPER: Thanks for having me.