Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US Secretary for Health and Human Services (HHS), during a cabinet seat in the White House in Washington, DC, USA, on Monday, March 24, 2025.
Samuel Corum | Bloomberg | Getty pictures
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Secretary for Health and Human Services, plans to reduce 10,000 full-time employees in various departments, since he has re-changed the state's federal health agencies, the department announced on Thursday.
These job cuts are in addition to around 10,000 employees who have decided to leave HHS since President Donald Trump accepted his office through voluntary separation offers. Together they will lead to the Federal Ministry of Health rejecting about a quarter of its workforce and it shrinks to 62,000 employees.
HHS is an agency of 1.7 trillion dollars that monitors vaccines and other medicines, scientific research, infrastructure for public health, pandemic readiness as well as food and tobacco products. The department also manages the state-funded health care of millions of Americans-domestic seniors, disabled people and patients with lower incomes who rely on Medicare, Medicaid and the markets of the Affordable Care Act.
The department will cut jobs in departments, which for the provision of insurance for the poorest Americans, the approval of new medication and the reaction to outbreaks of diseases, according to Wall Street Journal, which previously reported the cuts.
The most important restructuring comes when the United States has dealt with one of the worst measles outbursts for more than two decades and spread out in wild birds worldwide and cause outbreaks in poultry and US milk cows with several recent cases.
HHS will also be five of his 10 regional offices, but said that essential health services will not be affected.
“We not only reduce the bureaucratic spread. We have reorganized the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in the reversal of the epidemic of chronic diseases,” said Kennedy. “This department will do more – much more – at lower costs for the taxpayer.”
The department said the cuts will save the government around 1.8 billion US dollars a year. The federal government spent around 6.8 trillion dollars in the 2024 financial year.
Here are the employees who plans to shorten the Trump administration according to the journal:
- 3,500 full -time employees of the Food and Drug Administration or about 19% of their workforce
- 2,400 workers from the centers for the control and prevention of diseases or about 18% of the staff
- 1,200 employees of the National Institutes of Health or about 6% of its workforce
- 300 workers from the centers for Medicare and Medicaid services or about 4% of its employees
As part of the restructuring, Kennedy consolidates the 28 current departments of the department into 15 new ones, which according to HHS core functions such as human resources, information technology, procurement, external affairs and politics.
Among them is a new subdivision called administration for a healthy America that will combine offices in HHS, which, among other things, adds to poisonous substances, mental health and professional security in a central office. This includes the office of deputy secretary for health resources and services, administration of drug abuse and administration for mental health, agency for poisonous substances and disease register and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
The headquarters for health and human services (HHS) in Washington, DC, USA, on Monday, March 10, 2025.
Kent Nishimura | Bloomberg | Getty pictures
According to HHS, the combination of these agencies “will improve the coordination of health resources for Americans with low incomes and focus on areas such as basic care, the health of mothers and children, mental health, the health of the environment, the HIV/AIDS and the development of the workforce.
The administration for strategic willingness and reaction, which is responsible for the national disaster reaction and the planning of pandemic preparation, is moved under the CDC. ASPR is currently a separate operational department in HHS.
An HHS employee who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation measures said that the employees had not yet been informed about whether they are affected by the cuts. This uncertainty frightens the employees and raises questions that the leadership does not seem to answer not yet seems to answer, the person said.
Effects of the cuts
Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, said in a statement on Thursday that “American families are violated by layoffs and closures of this size, full of stop.”
“The chaos that comes will guarantee that children and seniors fall through the cracks with fatal consequences,” he said.
Larry Levitt, Executive Vice President for Health Policy at KFF, said that there is “an advantage of HHS's occasional reorganizations to achieve better coordination and efficiency”, which has taken place among republican and democratic administrations.
But he announced CNBC that the plans are “not just a restructuring of HHS” because they cut off the federal workforce, which will ultimately affect government services.
“People and health service providers may wait longer to get help and answer their questions, and that will cause frustration and delays in services,” said Levitt. “Many what HHS employees do behind the scenes is the supervision of the prevention of fraud and abuse and ensure that health programs offer the services they promise. If fewer people observe business at HHS, problems will arise.”
The cutting of employees, the consolidation of departments and the centralizing centralization of certain functions is unlikely, as the Trump government expects, said Genevieve Kanter, deputy professor of public policy at the University of Southern California. This is because HHS is a diverse department that monitors agencies with specific needs added.
For example, the information technology requirements of CMS are probably “much stricter” than that of other health authorities, since it monitors Medicare and Medicaid and managed the protected health information from millions of Americans, said Kanter.
She said that Kennedy's new subdivision seems to be “particularly incompatible with the aim of optimizing”, since the combined agencies are so different, but correspond to its areas of interest to combat chronic diseases.
“It is not obvious that there is an operational reason for the combination, since the regulation of food additives is obviously different from the regulation of fluoride in water supply, excites the needs of mental health and promotes movement in children who are under this chronic diseases,” said Kanter.
Overall, she found that inefficiencies in US health care in US health care are more related to defects in the way the system is structured and organized, and not with the announcement on Thursday, which suggests the announcement on Thursday.
Kennedy recovered us health policy
Before he was confirmed, Kennedy promised to end what he describes as “corporate corruption” at federal health agencies and entered the Trump administration employees.
He had said that he would provide “entire departments” at the FDA and said that workers who should stand in the way of the approval of several controversial or dubious treatments should prepare to “pack their pockets”.
Kennedy, a prominent vaccine skeptic, has taken early steps that have an impact on immunization policy and further dampens the admission in the United States at a time when vaccination rates decrease in childhood.
He said that he would check the schedule for the vaccination in childhood and, according to reports, is preparing to remove and replace members of external committees who advise the government, among other things, on vaccination moods and other important decisions for public health.
His so -called power America Health is again obliged to end the epidemic of chronic diseases in children and adults. Kennedy was loud to produce nutritious food as a drug, which is of central importance for this goal.
