Around a fifth of the 10,000 jobs cut from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were done in error and will need to be corrected, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has admitted.
Mass layoffs from the health department began this week amid a push by Donald Trump’s administration to shrink the size of the federal government workforce. Union representatives were told around 10,000 people were to lose their jobs ahead of further reductions that could see the department’s 82,000-strong workforce slashed by nearly a quarter.
But Kennedy, the former environmental lawyer and vaccine skeptic turned Trump ally, has said that a large slice of the layoffs by Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) are mistaken.
“Personnel that should not have been cut, were cut,” Kennedy told reporters on Thursday. “We’re reinstating them. And that was always the plan. Part of the Doge, we talked about this from the beginning, is we’re going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstated, because we’ll make mistakes.”
The US health secretary said that some of the people who lost their jobs were not in the administrative roles that were targeted by Doge, with the cull also affecting research work.
A program by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that monitors for lead exposure in children was among the work mistakenly gutted by the layoffs, Kennedy said. “There were some programs that were cut that are being reinstated, and I believe that that’s one,” he said.
It’s still not clear which staff will be reinstated or what functions the health department will retain. The huge job cuts have affected broad swaths of the department’s work, with experts lost across areas as diverse as smoking, infertility and mine safety.
The cuts to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) included the division devoted to crafting tobacco policy, which was paid for by the tobacco industry.
Robert Califf, former FDA commissioner, said the layoffs were “a dark day for public health”.
