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Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington on May 14, 2025. Madalina Vasiliu/The Epoch Times
A lawsuit filed on June 3 accused Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other officials of using faulty data to carry out mass terminations at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
The suit states that workers at the department saw problems in the termination notices they received on April 1, including erroneous performance ratings. One of the plaintiffs, Catherine Jackson, 68, who worked for the department’s Office of Child Care at the Administration for Children and Families, for instance, was listed as having a recent rating of three, but had never received a score lower than four in past ratings, according to the lawsuit.
Kennedy said in April that some employees were wrongly cut, and an HHS spokesperson told media outlets in April that “to the extent there are errors, it is because the data collected by HHS’s multiple, siloed HR divisions is inaccurate.”
HHS and other agencies, including the Department of Government Efficiency, acted without verifying information or giving workers individualized notices, according to the suit.
“For these Plaintiffs, HHS’s intentional failure to maintain complete and accurate records before making life-changing employment decisions was a clear violation of the law,” the lawsuit stated. “And Plaintiffs suffered real harm immediately, which will remain unredressed even if their jobs are eventually reinstated.”
Jackson and the other plaintiffs are asking the federal court in Washington to certify a class of many employees fired by HHS, or any terminated workers whose notices contained personnel-related errors.
They also want the judge overseeing the case to declare that officials illegally used inaccurate data to carry out the mass reduction-in-force and to award damages.
“Because the decision makers at these agencies were working with such flawed data, they barely knew who they were cutting,” Clayton L. Bailey, whose Civil Service Law Center filed the suit, said in a statement. “These employees suffered the consequences.”
In addition to Kennedy, defendants include the Office of Management and Budget and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who was helping lead the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) when it assisted HHS in identifying workers to eliminate.
HHS includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
A spokesperson for the Department of Justice, which represents government agencies in court, declined to comment. An HHS spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email that the agency does not comment on litigation.
In March, Kennedy announced the terminations, saying they were part of a plan to improve efficiency and effectiveness.
Some 10,000 notices were sent on April 1, according to health officials.
Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California blocked the firings in May, finding that the Trump administration had not consulted Congress before implementing workforce reductions in HHS and other departments.
The approximately 10,000 workers are on administrative leave as the case proceeds, Kennedy told a congressional panel later that month.
Government lawyers on June 2 asked the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene, arguing that the injunction “rests on the indefensible premise that the President needs explicit statutory authorization from Congress to exercise his core Article II authority to superintend the internal personnel decisions of the Executive Branch.”
