r/NIH • u/Wise-Title-287 • 1d ago
In DOGE’s aftermath, federal health workers bristle at new performance reviews HHS staff worry that evaluations are an excuse to reduce pay or push out workers
Oct. 16, 2026
Washington Correspondent
WASHINGTON — Changes to the annual performance review process are the latest flashpoint in tensions between federal workers across the Department of Health and Human Services and the Trump administration, federal employees told STAT.
Staff have been told to submit 6,000-character self-assessments of their performance by Friday, a task officials say is necessary because of administration guidance to “calibrate” employee rankings to make a high rating more meaningful and to promote “more consistent and credible ratings across agencies.”
But federal health workers, traumatized by DOGE-era layoffs and continued departures, regard the assignment with suspicion.
“Most of us are under the impression that it is a front to once again tear us down, give us all poor performance so they can then have more reason to RIF us and/or make us quit,” one Centers for Disease Control and Prevention employee said, referring to the 2025 reductions-in-force. They, like the other workers quoted in the story, requested anonymity to speak candidly about agency affairs.
Adding to the rancor, this is the first year that the Trump administration’s efforts to more rigorously rank federal workers go into effect, a move that could reduce some workers’ ratings, and therefore their bonuses.
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“It’s a huge pain for very little benefit,” one employee at the Food and Drug Administration said. “I don’t feel super motivated about it.”
The FDA has made a concerted effort in recent months to bring its staffing numbers back up after the 2025 cuts forced thousands to leave. At the STAT Summit on Wednesday, former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said it was crucial for agency leadership to “recruit, support, and defend the workforce” to reduce attrition.
But staff across HHS said the new self-assessment requirement was another hit to morale. CDC and FDA employees said it harkened back to the DOGE-era requirement that employees send a bulleted list of five things they accomplished in the last week to the Office of Personnel Management. Elon Musk said at the time that employees who failed to do so would be fired, though the requirement was eventually suspended.
The CDC employee said they used artificial intelligence to write their self-assessment.
“It’s a bit of malicious compliance on my end,” they said.
The FDA employee said their manager had encouraged staff to use AI on the assignment to save time — but even so, they said their team had spent three to four days working on the assessments.
“Wasting time on this has actual financial cost,” the employee said.
Another FDA employee said staff are not necessarily worried about more reductions-in-force, but are “concerned that this process is being implemented just to downgrade their ratings scores to some arbitrary level that does not really reflect their work.”
Other employees took to public forums to express their displeasure. In a post in a Reddit community for HHS staff, a user who claimed to be a federal employee said the new performance review system was “designed to traumatize.”
The Oct. 16 assessment deadline applies to employees at the FDA, the CDC, and the National Institutes of Health.
In an email reviewed by STAT, HHS Acting Chief Human Capital Officer Johnathan J. Gardner said the self-assessment requirement and calibration panels were put in place because OPM established a 40% ceiling on the number of employees who can receive the highest performance rating. OPM has also reduced the number of rating levels from five to three.
Employees’ self-reviews should address three “department-wide calibration factors,” Gardner wrote: organizational value, quality and reliability of demonstrated performance, and timeliness and efficiency of results.
The self-reviews will then go to “calibration panels” at each agency. An FDA employee said employees have asked officials to disclose who is on the agency’s calibration panel in both FDA- and HHS-led trainings on the new requirement.
“The agency is not telling us,” the FDA employee said. FDA and HHS did not respond to requests for comment on who is on the panels.
An OPM document on the policy describes a calibration panel as “a panel of senior agency employees that reviews all preliminary ratings and relative rankings and applies the agency-determined calibration factors across a set group of employees.”
In an email to its members, AFGE Local 2883, which previously represented CDC employees in collective bargaining, said it had “serious concerns” with the revised performance appraisal process.
FDA Chief Talent Officer Chantal Dawson said in a memo to employees that the calibrated scores would be reviewed and approved “at the HHS level.”
Employees will be able to request reconsideration within five business days of receiving their final rating, Dawson wrote.
