Trump administration closes regional HHS office in downtown Seattle
Robert Kennedy, Secretary of Health and Human Services
Washington joined a coalition of states in suing the Trump administration Monday over the deep cuts and layoffs at the federal Department of Health and Human Services, which they say have torn the department apart, depriving it of the resources needed to do its job.
“Over the course of a few days in late March and early April, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. dismantled the Department in violation of Congress’s instructions, the U.S. Constitution, and the many statutes that govern the Department’s programs,” the lawsuit, filed in federal District Court in Rhode Island, says.
The cuts and layoffs, the lawsuit says, have left the massive federal department “unable to perform statutory functions.”
There has been no one to answer phones at HHS offices, the lawsuit says, experiments have been abandoned, labs have stopped testing for infectious diseases, and the Food and Drug Administration missed a vaccine application deadline and canceled a test for the bird flu virus, suspending that program for a year.
Organizations that were supposed to receive grants from HHS programs like Head Start and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program have been abandoned, with no one to answer their questions, the lawsuit says. Programs for coal miners suffering from black lung disease and for first responders of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center have been hobbled as staff was laid off, the lawsuit says.
In total, the lawsuit says, the Trump administration has fired or pushed out 20,000 HHS employees, roughly a quarter of the department’s workforce.
Washington co-led the lawsuit — with New York and Rhode Island — which was filed by a total of 18 states and the District of Columbia.
“These actions are both plainly illegal and a moral failing,” Washington Attorney General Nick Brown said in a prepared statement. “More Americans will suffer from illness, injury, and death without these commonsense programs.”
The lawsuit points to April 1, 2025, when it says HHS sent termination notices to some 10,000 employees and shuttered dozens of agencies.
“Employees were immediately expelled from their work email, laptops, and offices, work across the vast and complicated Department came to a sudden halt,” the lawsuit says.
On that day in Seattle, the administration shut down its regional office in Seattle, laying off hundreds of employees who served Washington, Oregon, Idaho and Alaska. HHS’ office space on the 15th floor of downtown Seattle’s Columbia Center was hastily abandoned that day. Desks were empty, cleared of papers and personal effects. A custodian pushed a trash barrel, cleaning up the detritus that remained.
The 15th floor office of U.S. Department of Health & Human Services office sits abandoned Tuesday, April 1, at Columbia Center in downtown Seattle. (David Gutman / The Seattle Times)
Kennedy later said many people were fired in error.
“Personnel that should not have been cut, were cut,” he said on April 3. “We’re reinstating them. And that was always the plan. Part of the — at DOGE, we talked about this from the beginning, is we’re going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstated, because we’ll make mistakes.”
Kennedy has said he wants to streamline the sprawling department, consolidating 28 agencies into 15. The Seattle office was one of five of the Department’s 10 regional offices that he shuttered.
But the cuts, the lawsuit says, were intended to eliminate many HHS programs, “even though Congress has appropriated funds for these programs.”
The administration intends to eliminate programs to study and treat HIV, hepatitis and tuberculosis, the lawsuit says. It intends to slash the budget for routine inspections of food facilities and for mental health and substance abuse treatment.
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Among the agencies Kennedy has moved to shutter is the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which works to prevent workplace injuries and disease. It funds the Northwest Center for Occupational Health and Safety at the University of Washington, which would be forced to close without its parent agency.
NIOSH employees in Spokane recently designed and built a new dust control system for use in mines that reduces deadly silica dust by 93%, the lawsuit says.
Brown has previously sued the Trump administration over cuts to the National Institutes of Health (twice) and for an $11 billion cut in public health funding to the states. In total, he has sued the Trump administration 15 times.
David Gutman, The Seattle Times, 206-464-2926 or dgutman@seattletimes.com.