“A Sicker America”: RFK Jr.’s HHS Will Lay Off 10,000 Staff

RFK Jr. at the California Libertarian Party Convention in 2024. Brian Cahn/Zuma

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Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s remaking of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) entered a new phase on Thursday, when officials announced that the department’s workforce would shrink by another 10,000 staff to comply with President Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s orders to drastically shrink the federal government.

HHS announced that the “dramatic restructuring” of the agency will include cuts to offices including the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Combined with HHS’s other efforts to reduce its workforce—the buyout offers it recently made to employees and its January “fork in the road email” that offered federal workers eight months’ pay to resign—the department’s overall workforce will go from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees, a reduction of nearly 25 percent. In a six-minute video posted to X detailing the plans, Kennedy acknowledged that the cuts will bring about “a painful period for HHS.”

The agency offered some details on the specific offices that will see cuts, including the NIH, which will lose about 1,200 employees; the FDA, which will lose about 3,500 employees, which HHS claims “will not affect drug, medical device, or food reviewers, nor will it impact inspectors”; the CMS, which will lose about 300 employees, which the agency says “will not impact Medicare and Medicaid services”; and the CDC, which will lose about 2,400.

HHS’ 28 divisions will be reduced to 15, to include a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America, which “will centralize core functions such as Human Resources, Information Technology, Procurement, External Affairs, and Policy,” according to the HHS news release; that office will also now include the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), which HHS says “will break down artificial divisions between similar programs.”

The press release from HHS also announced the dismantling of the Administration for Community Living, which oversees vital programs and services for disabled and aging people. It includes independent living centers and protection and advocacy agencies, which were established by Congress and perform important tasks such as investigating claims of abuse in group homes for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities; in 2022, ACL also unveiled a National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers. In a LinkedIn post, former ACL acting administrator and Assistant Secretary for Aging Alison Barkoff said that ACL “has been incredibl[y] effective, with lean staffing and programs with incredible returns on investments.” Its dismantling, Barkoff wrote, was “yet another” move that hurt disabled and older adults, in addition to ongoing attacks on Medicaid and an executive order hollowing out the federal Department of Education as a prelude to abolishing it altogether.

While the press release said that programs under ACL will be reorganized, there will likely be disruptions along the way. “We are deeply concerned that these HHS organizational changes and workforce reductions may undermine the momentum and implementation of our nation’s first-ever National Strategy to Support Family Caregivers,” said Jason Resendez, President and CEO of the National Alliance for Caregiving, in a press release.

HHS will also shutter five of its regional offices, which amount to half of the total. It is not immediately clear how this will affect the agency’s return-to-office mandate, which required employees within 50 miles of an HHS office to begin working in-person five days a week; those who live more than 50 miles from an HHS building have been ordered to report to any federal office building—which, as previously reported, led federal workers to question how offices would manage the influx of in-person employees.

Spokespeople for HHS did not immediately respond to specific questions from Mother Jones about which regional offices would close, the 13 specific divisions that will be consolidated, and how many, if any, employees of the ACL would lose their jobs.

The department claims that, in total, the measures will save the agency $1.8 billion annually. The agency said it would also appoint a new Assistant Secretary for Enforcement “to combat waste, fraud, and abuse in federal health programs.”

“Over time, bureaucracies like HHS become wasteful and inefficient even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent civil servants,” Kennedy said in a statement. “This overhaul will be a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves.”

Some public health experts, though, believe otherwise.

Dr. Tom Frieden, former CDC director under President Obama, said in a post on X: “CDC has been the flagship of public health for generations, pursuing its core mission of saving lives and protecting people from health threats of all kinds. A weaker CDC means a sicker America.”

Jill Rosenthal, director of public health policy at the nonpartisan Center for American Progress, said in a statement: “This is not ‘streamlining’ work—it’s slashing what Americans across the country rely on to keep them, their families, and their communities healthy. This move to gut HHS will bring to a screeching halt crucial efforts to ensure Americans that our food is safe, drugs and medical devices are up to standards, our family members can access needed health services, and our communities are protected from health emergencies.”

Some also find it hard to believe that the cuts will not affect the work of the targeted offices. “I worry how losing 3,500 people at the FDA will ensure drug, medical devices, and food are still inspected and approved efficiently,” one CDC researcher told us. “Those function areas were already understaffed,” she said, adding that it was also unclear how cuts to the FDA would help achieve HHS’ new stated goals to tackle “chronic illness by focusing on safe, wholesome food, clean water, and the elimination of environmental toxins.”

“I just don’t see how things can operate the way they are now with 10-20,000 less people,” said an employee of the Administration for Children and Families.

An NIH employee said he saw the news as proof that “RFK Jr. is carrying out the marching orders of President Musk with total disregard for how these ‘changes’ will impact public health and the public health system.”

“He’s not a doctor. He’s not a scientist,” the NIH employee said of the HHS head. “In fact, just the opposite. He’s a conspiracy theorist.”

“This Make America Healthy Again nonsense will do just the opposite of what they’re claiming it will do,” he added. “It will make us sicker. Mentally and physically.”

Multiple HHS employees told us on Thursday morning that they had received no internal announcement of, nor further information on, the planned cuts, and had instead learned about them from the news media. Due to the lack of detail on which employees would lose their jobs, according to those staffers, the potential impacts of the cuts on public health and the agency’s mission were still impossible to determine. Several said they expected to receive more information on Friday about how their offices would be affected by the changes.

An NIH scientific review officer said the lack of internal communication was “part of why we have been mired in such uncertainty and chaos.”

“We often learn [about changes] from outside sources,” like the media or former colleagues, she said. She characterized the lack of communication as “yet another move that feels designed to be demoralizing and stressful for the workforce.”

“It’s not clear what our leadership knows, or if they have been consulted,” she added. “Without that, it’s difficult to imagine changes being effective and efficient and in service of our mission.”

Even without knowing whether they will be impacted, employees are bracing for the worst. “The mood is pretty awful,” another ACF worker said. “Supervisors told us we could go home if we needed to.”

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.