(WASHINGTON) — The Department of Health and Human Services confirmed on Thursday that about 10,000 full-time employees will soon lose their jobs, on top of the nearly 10,000 who have already left the agency in the last few months through buyout offers or early retirements.
That puts the total employees at around 62,000 people — down from 82,000 at the start of the Trump administration. The agency oversees the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — among other divisions.
“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in a statement on Thursday.
“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,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy claimed the latest cuts will save taxpayers $1.8 billion per year. The cuts will reduce the number of regional offices — from 10 down to five. It will also combine the current 28 divisions at HHS into 15 divisions, including a new one focused on Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement, to be named the Administration for a Healthy America.
“We’re going to eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments and agencies, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America,” Kennedy said in a video out Thursday explaining the cuts.
Despite cutting nearly one-quarter of the agency, the department maintains that the restructuring won’t impact “critical services.”
The real-world impact of the newest round of cuts, however, remains to be seen. Already, cuts have hit top researchers at the National Institute of Health’s Alzheimer’s research center and disease detectives who identify new infectious diseases.
Some Republican on Capitol Hill had differing views on the cuts.
Republican Rep. Nicole Malliotakis said she is “concerned about rash decisions being made” when asked about the cuts to the Health and Human Services Department.
Florida Republican Rep. Byron Donalds brushed off any concerns about cuts to HHS.
“We’re a very bloated federal government. Spending is an addiction in this town. We have to find ways to be lean and efficient with people’s money and this is the start of a process in the federal government that is frankly going to be able to be lean and efficient for the future of our nation,” he said.
Democrats meanwhile said they were still waiting for more information about the cuts.
Democratic Sen. John Hickenlooper decried what he assessed as a lack of a clear plan on how to make cuts that actually work.
“I think a little more planning and more focus on making sure that we do continue to deliver the services — Health and Human Services,” Hickenlooper said. “We are talking about Medicaid. We’re talking about, you know, all the research we do to create the miracle of vaccines all that stuff. You can’t just willy nilly [cut] these thousands and thousands of people. It doesn’t make sense.”
ABC News’ Will McDuffie, Allison Pecorin, Arthur Jones II and Lauren Peller contributed to this report.
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