Well being and Human Companies (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended the administration’s choice to chop 10,000 jobs on the division on Thursday, confirming that important workers would stay a part of the employees.
“We’re not cutting front line workers, we’re cutting administrators, and we’re consolidating the agency to make it more efficient,” Kennedy mentioned throughout a Thursday night look on NewsNation’s “CUOMO.”
Along with the brand new cuts, HHS is trying to take away a further 10,000 by severance packages, buyouts and early retirements. Kennedy, in a video shared to social platform X, acknowledged “this will probably be a painful interval for HHS.”
The transfer would lower a fourth of the division’s workforce, resembling comparable discount in forces on the Division of Schooling, Division of Veteran Affairs and different businesses according to President Trump and the Division of Authorities Effectivity’s (DOGE) efforts to chop down on “wasteful” spending and overhaul the workforce.
“We have over 100 comms departments. You have 40 procurement departments. We have dozens of IT departments, dozens of HR departments, none of them talk to each other,” Kennedy informed host Chris Cuomo.
“And what we’re trying to do now is to streamline the agency, to eliminate the redundancies and to focus the mission so that everybody who is at HHS is going to wake up every morning and say, ‘What am I going to do today to Make America Healthy Again,’ and we’re going to make it easier for those who are not cutting scientists,” he added.
Some have objected to Kennedy’s management of the division, citing the previous impartial presidential candidates’ lack of earlier expertise within the medical subject and anti-vaccine rhetoric.
Former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius mentioned she is worried in regards to the job cuts and their impact on public well being amid funding deductions for analysis grants by the Nationwide Institutes of Well being (NIH).
“I’m worried on a lot of fronts,” Sebelius mentioned throughout The Hill’s “Health Next Summit.”
“The sorts of cuts that have been simply introduced are devastating and can set science again and set analysis again,” she added.
