HHS loses 20,000 jobs in reconstruction: Shot

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or HHS, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has announced the major restructuring and RIF he leads.

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Jason C. Andrew/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The Trump administration announced a massive restructuring of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Thursday, cutting 20,000 full-time jobs.

Cuts include employees who took the Trump administration Road junction In addition to offers and early retirement, it will further cut 10,000 jobs. According to the HHS workforce, the HHS workforce will range from 82,000 to 62,000. Press release from an agency.

The restructuring also includes restructuring many divisions of HHS, reducing them from 28 to 15.

“We're not only reducing bureaucratic sprawl, we're reconciliating our organization with core missions and new priorities to reverse the chronic disease epidemic.” He said in a press release. “This department does more at a lower cost for taxpayers.”

HHS is an umbrella body that includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and other small-scale divisions.

The restructuring includes the creation of a new administration for a healthy American or AHA, with the aim of “coordinating chronic care and disease prevention programs more efficiently.” It will integrate several existing institutions with a focus on primary care, mother and child health, mental health, and HIV/AIDS.

The cuts include 3,500 full-time employees from the FDA, 2,400 at CDC, 1,200 at NIH and 300 at CMS. HHS fact sheet. The new job at the FDA says it will not affect reviewers or inspectors of drugs, medical devices or food. Reorganizations have no impact on Medicare or Medicaid.

HHS says it will save $1.8 billion from job cuts. The agency currently has a budget of around $2 trillion, with the majority of which paying benefits to Americans eligible for Medicaid and Medicare.

These cuts coincide with President Trump's dramatic vision Reduce the size and scope of the federal government – Efforts have been guided so far by Elon Musk and his government's efficiency or Doge.

“The occasional reorganization of HHS has its advantages, but it also concerns large staff and program cuts,” writes Larry Levitt, a nonpartisan health research organization, on social media.

“More than what HHS employees do is behind behind-the-scenes surveillance to prevent fraud and abuse and ensure that healthcare programs provide promised services.

in Social Media Video Posted Thursday morning, Secretary Kennedy characterized the HHS as a vast, dysfunctional bureaucracy.

In the video, he shook the department's staff, praised their work and accused them of hurting Americans' health.

“When I arrived, I found out that more than half of our employees didn't even come to work,” he said. (HHS did not immediately respond to questions about whether employees have approved telewalking arrangements.

“HHS has over 100 telecom offices, over 40 IT departments, dozens of procurement offices and nine HR departments. In many cases, they don't even talk to each other.”

He described “small territory” in the existence of “it is so adiabatic and territorial that it actually stores patient medical data and sells it to each other for profit,” but did not provide details.

“While public health is declining, some isolated sectors have completely ignored public health and seem to be responsible only for the industries they should be regulating,” he said.

Senator Angela is D-Md. (The plan to cut 20,000 jobs from HHS is “dangerous and deadly.”

“These mass layoffs will take human lives in health and welfare services layoffs,” Brooks also said. “I'll do everything I can to fight this.”

Senator Bill Cassidy, r-la. Posted on x He hopes HHS works better, including quickly approving drugs and improving Medicare services. “We look forward to hearing how this reorganization will drive these goals.”

and one of Kennedy's allies in Make America Healthy Movement, Writered and Antrepreneur Calley. I wrote an X post Praise the restructuring: “Insane spending and staffing in healthcare are actually the cause of our bad health outcomes.”

The cuts are rattling health agency staff, according to three current NIH employees who don't want to be identified because of fear of retaliation.

“People are exhausted. People are scared of the future of NIH more than they worry about their livelihoods. [and] The science says, “One employee said.

Another NIH employee said the agency lost about 4,400 employees from around 18,000 staff. These include 1,200 probation employees today at RIF, 1,200 previously fired probation employees, and forks of early retirements, buyouts or road offers.

People will lose their jobs on Friday and know if the RIF will come into effect in May, NIH employees said it is hampering the cuts that could occur if the new next NIH director, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, ordered the reorganization of the NIH.

A third NIH employee says the RIF is primarily affecting management staff, including HR, IT, procurement and finance.

“It's impossible to imagine a cut of this size not negatively affecting function,” said Jeremy Berg of the University of Pittsburgh, who served as director of the National Institutes of General Medical Sciences, part of the National Institutes of Health between 2003 and 2011.

The restructuring will move the administration for strategic preparation and response to handling medical responses to natural disasters and public health emergencies, from direct reporting to the Health Secretary to being housed under the CDC. Dawn O'Connell, former director of ASPR in the Biden administration, told NPR that the move could limit its scope. “It's interesting to me to put us in the CDC when the CDC wants to focus on infectious disease work.”

Under the Biden administration, ASPR has been promoted to the management division, so O'Connell says that it can be more nuanced in response to the lessons learned during Covid.

“We don't grue the new administration coming to understand whether we got it right or not, but this idea of ​​losing the progress we went and fought is going to bring them back,” she says.

Dr. Georges Benjamin, head of the American Public Health Association, said in a statement that the reorganization of the HHS was A $11 billion cut It refutes the goal of improving US health in raising funds for state and local health sectors announced earlier this week.

“This is a pointless relocation of institutions under their responsibility and an excuse to destroy the workforce for financial reasons,” Benjamin said. “It will increase morbidity and mortality in our population, increase health costs and undermine the economy.”

The National Treasurer Union, a union representing many federal workers, issued a statement on Thursday denounced the cuts and said they would “fight back.”

“If this disastrous plan is implemented and the agency is proposed to lose another 10,000 employees, the impact on public health services across the country will be devastating,” NTEU President Doreen Greenwald said.

Is there any information you would like to share about ongoing changes across federal health agencies? Please contact these authors via encrypted communication: Selena Simmons-Duffin @selena.02, Pien Huang @Pienhuang.88 and Rob Stein @Robstein.22.