WASHINGTON, D.C. (Politico) — Officials with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services have announced on social media that the agency is hiring for dozens of new positions to help realize its Make America Healthy Again agenda.
“The CMS Innovation Center is hiring passionate leaders eager to make meaningful change in the healthcare delivery and outcomes in Medicare and Medicaid,” Director of Patient Care Models Group at the Innovation Center, Sarah Fogler, wrote on LinkedIn last week. Several employees at the Innovation Center posted the same message on the jobs social media site.
The Innovation Center, formally known as the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation, will hire roughly 100 positions, according to one current and one former employee at CMS granted anonymity to discuss internal operations. The center is expected to post some jobs through the USA Jobs site, the staff member said. Meanwhile, on LinkedIn, the Center’s employees are asking interested parties to email resumes to them directly.
“There will be a mix of new hires with subject matter expertise in economics, clinical and data,” according to an official granted anonymity to speak freely on the hiring blitz. The Innovation Center was established under the Affordable Care Act in 2010. It has long promoted creative models of preventive care. It has piloted some 50 payment models, including the Accountable Care Organizations, which pay a group of doctors to manage Medicare patients’ care and spending. It also launched a successful diabetes prevention program to helpmMedicare patients trim down and improve blood sugar levels.
Innovation Center Director Abe Sutton now sees an opportunity to boost preventive care by building on pilots like the diabetes prevention program and expanding to other categories of disease. New models could give patients access to personal health devices, apps and more information about the quality of providers and services. To realize this vision, CMS is hiring for the center en masse, despite recently firing nearly 300 workers, or about 5 percent of the CMS staff.
Although no Innovation Center staff were fired during the Trump administration’s reduction in force, they lost probationary employees during an initial culling in February. Two former CMS workers who were fired as part of a wider reduction in force, told POLITICO they tried to apply for the new positions, but were told that the agency cannot hire RIF-ed employees. One shared an email from Fogler with POLITICO.
“We aren’t able to hire individuals who were affected by the reduction in force,” Fogler wrote to one of the former employees who attempted to submit their resume.
“We’ll have two postings for direct hire (economist and nurse) otherwise we’ll be hiring through the CMS Fellow pathway,” Fogler wrote.
CMS said in a statement that all hiring decisions follow federal guidelines and “reflect CMS commitment to program integrity and fiscal responsibility.”
The agency did not respond to questions about whether RIF-ed employees would be considered for either newly posted jobs or the fellows positions. There is a hiring freeze at the rest of the agency, according to the current and former staff. The CMS fellows program is designed to bring in people, sometimes graduate students or people early in their careers, to work on new models of care. These positions are temporary, because Innovation Center pilots are time limited and can end
early.
Employees hired through a competitive process and fired through a reduction-in-force action are supposed to have priority consideration for new positions, per federal rules. However, they must have the appropriate qualifications for the role, said Michael C. Fallings, a managing partner at the law firm Tully Rinckey where he represents federal workers in employment cases.
He said this rash of hirings could potentially be used to legally challenge the necessity of a reduction in force.
