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The Trump administration must halt much of its dramatic downsizing of the federal workforce, a California judge ordered Friday. Judge Susan Illston in San Francisco issued the emergency order in a lawsuit filed last week by labor unions and cities, one of multiple legal challenges to Republican President Donald Trump’s efforts to shrink the size of a federal government he calls bloated and expensive. (Har, 5/10)

The Department of Health and Human Services is moving for a second time to fire probationary employees at the nation's health agencies, multiple federal officials said, after many previously had their terminations paused amid court battles over their fate. In mid-February, thousands of recently hired or promoted workers at the department had received letters firing them, but those firings were temporarily reversed by multiple court orders. Many workers who did not leave for other jobs have been on paid leave since. (Tin, 5/9)

A seafood company failed to follow federal safety rules to prevent potential botulism contamination. A business was hawking dietary supplements with the misleading claim that they’d cure, treat or prevent disease. A fresh sprouts producer didn’t take adequate precautions against contamination. The Food and Drug Administration laid out these inspection findings in warning letters, accusing the companies of committing “significant violations” of federal laws, according to an FDA staff member who described the letters to NBC News. (Khimm, 5/9)

At the Environmental Protection Agency, research at 11 laboratories has ground to a halt because the Trump administration has not approved most new lab purchases. At the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, key work on weather forecasting has slowed to a crawl because Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick must sign off personally on many contracts and grants. And at the Social Security Administration, some employees are running out of paper, pens and printer toner because the U.S. DOGE Service has placed a $1 spending limit on government-issued credit cards. (DOGE stands for Department of Government Efficiency, though it is not a Cabinet-level agency.) (Natanson and Joselow, 5/11)

The Trump administration’s purge of the health department is cutting so deep that it has incapacitated congressionally mandated programs and triggered legal challenges. The administration insists the cuts are a lawful “streamlining” of a “bloated” agency, but federal workers, Democratic lawmakers, state officials and independent legal experts say keeping offices afloat in name only – with minimal or no staff – is an unconstitutional power grab. (Ollstein and Gardner, 5/11)

More than 100 current and former employees of a federal agency charged with ensuring workplace safety warn that American workers face a greater risk of death and injury on the job as the Trump administration slashes the organization’s ranks. In a letter to Congress, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health employees say that the agency’s mission is at risk due to the administration’s actions over the past several months. (Soboroff, 5/11)

For James Antaki, a biomedical engineering professor at Cornell University, the $6.7 million government grant meant babies would be saved. Awarded by the Department of Defense on March 30, it would allow his team at Cornell to ramp up production and testing of PediaFlow, a device that boosts blood flow in infants with heart defects. A week later, that all changed. The Defense Department sent Antaki a stop-work order on April 8 informing him that his team wouldn’t get the money, intended to be distributed over four years. Three decades of research is now at risk, and Antaki said he has no idea why the government cut off funding. (Kingkade, 5/10)

President Donald Trump’s push to cut billions of dollars in government contracts is rattling the niche community of scientists who collect, study and share human brains. Two of the country’s brain banks, which have worked with the government to store and distribute specimens to researchers studying diseases like Parkinson’s and ALS for more than a decade, told POLITICO they had temporarily stopped taking new donations for fear the administration would not renew their contracts. (Schumaker, 5/9)

Amid deep cuts to U.S. government-funded research and revived scrutiny of their work, Chinese and Chinese-American researchers are reassessing their futures in this country, potentially shifting the balance in global scientific innovation, as well as in the biopharma industry. (Yang, 5/12)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: �鶹Ů�� Health News’ ‘An Arm and a Leg’: A Health Policy Veteran Puts 2025 In Perspective

News has been coming out of Washington, D.C., since the start of the second Donald Trump administration like water out of a fire hose. It can feel impossible to stay on top of all the changes. So in this episode of “An Arm and a Leg,” host Dan Weissmann speaks with �鶹Ů�� Health News chief Washington correspondent Julie Rovner to try to get a handle on what’s happened so far. (Weissmann, 5/12)

�鶹Ů�� Health News: �鶹Ů�� Health News’ ‘Letters To The Editor’: Readers Scrutinize Federal Cuts And Medical Debt

Trump Team’s Rhetoric Doesn’t Match Actions. The recent �鶹Ů�� Health News article “Beyond Ivy League, RFK Jr.’s NIH Slashed Science Funding Across States That Backed Trump” (April 17) struck a nerve. The rapid succession of suspended National Institutes of Health grants that swept the country shortly after President Donald Trump’s election have left us struggling to understand why such vital research — the bedrock of our ability to support the public’s health — would be treated as unnecessary or, worse, harmful. (5/12)