Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr is directing his Department of Health and Human Services to ax 10,000 employees across several agencies as part of the White House’s “reduction in force” plan to downsize the federal government.
The department oversees more than a dozen agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration.
The layoffs, combined with another 10,000 employees who left voluntarily, will bring the department’s total full-time staff from 82,000 down to 62,000 full-time employees, a cut of nearly 25 percent. The department will also close half iof ts regional offices.
The restructuring plan will reduce the department’s 28 divisions into just 15, the agency said in a statement Thursday. Kennedy, meanwhile, is adding a new Administration for a Healthy America.
“We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for Healthy America or AHA,” Kennedy said on X.
“Over time, bureaucracies like HHS become wasteful and inefficient even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent civil servants,” Kennedy said. “This overhaul will be a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves. That’s the entire American public, because our goal is to Make America Healthy Again.”
Morale was already the “lowest it’s ever been” at public health agencies, and this rapid downsizing could impact the services they provide, warned Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association
“I’ve done big reorganizations before,” Benjamin told CNN. “You have to do them very, very carefully, very deliberately. Every time you move the boxes around, every time you downsize or upsize organizations, you make them dysfunctional for some period of time.”
Experts say this will impact physicians and other healthcare providers across the country.
“Reductions in the federal workforce may seem more efficient, but it could result in more wasteful spending down the road,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, told CNN. “New efforts to improve healthy behaviors may work at cross purposes to dramatic reductions in federal programs and big cuts to Medicaid being considered by Congress.”
The “work and expertise of HHS staff are critical to the well-being of our entire population — and to physicians’ ability to provide care to patients,” Dr. Stella Dantas, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told CNN.
“This attack on public health — and HHS’ ability to advance it — will hurt people across the United States every single day,” she said.
Democratic Senator Angela Alsobrooks called the cuts “dangerous and deadly.”
"These mass layoffs at Health and Human Services will cost human lives," she said. "I will do all I can to fight this."
