Departed staffers include people who booked complex international trips to remote Indian pharmaceutical plants, lab scientists who tested food samples for contamination, and communication specialists who alerted the public to urgent safety recalls.

Employees across the massive U.S. Health and Human Services Department began receiving notices of dismissal on Tuesday in an overhaul ultimately expected to lay off up to 10,000 people.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticized the department he oversees as an inefficient “sprawling bureaucracy” in a video announcing the restructuring Thursday. He faulted the department’s 82,000 workers for a decline in Americans’ health.

The reversal is the latest example of President Donald Trump and billionaire Elon Musk’s chaotic approach to cost-cutting, which has resulted in several agencies firing, and then scrambling to rehire, employees responsible for nuclear weapons, national parks and other government services.

The firings appeared to focus on employees in the agency’s centers for food, medical devices and tobacco products — which includes oversight of electronic cigarettes. It was not clear whether FDA employees who review drugs were exempted.

The Food Safety Act passed out of the Senate Public Health Committee this week. It would ban the use of four chemicals in Illinois foods: brominated vegetable oil, red dye No. 3, potassium bromate and propylparaben.

It’s the first new pharmaceutical approach to treating pain in more than 20 years, offering an alternative to both opioids and over-the-counter medications like ibuprofen and acetaminophen.

The move comes nearly 35 years after the dye known as Red 3 was barred from cosmetics because of potential cancer risk.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration spent more than 15 years crafting the guidelines, which are designed to do away with industry practices that downplay or distract viewers from risk information.

With the Food and Drug Administration’s clearance, Pfizer and Moderna are set to begin shipping millions of doses. A third U.S. manufacturer, Novavax, expects its modified vaccine version to be available a little later.

The agency is expected to greenlight updated mRNA vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech that target a strain of the virus called KP.2, said the sources, who declined to be named because the timing information isn’t public.

Eli Lilly’s Kisunla was approved for mild or early cases of dementia caused by Alzheimer’s. It’s only the second drug that’s been convincingly shown to delay cognitive decline in patients, following last year’s approval of a similar drug from Japanese drugmaker Eisai.

The FDA sent a warning letter to Dollar Tree this month and placed Negasmart, the Ecuadorian distributor of WanaBana apple cinnamon pouches, under import alerts following the October 2023 recall of the products found to be contaminated with “extremely high” levels of lead and chromium.

The FDA and DOJ have legally barred about a half-dozen vaping companies for selling products that can appeal to youngsters, but many more manufacturers continue launching new products, primarily disposable vapes that can’t be refilled and are thrown in the trash.

Food and Drug Administration advisers voted unanimously that the drug’s ability to slow the disease outweighs its risks, including side effects like brain swelling and bleeding that will have to be monitored.

The Illinois Food Safety Act passed on a 37-15 bipartisan vote and will head to the state House for consideration. The banned chemicals are used in a wide variety of food products.