RFK Jr. Set to Take an Axe to His Own Department: Offices Shuttered, Thousands of Jobs Cut
The Department of Health and Human Services is cutting about 10,000 jobs.
“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, according to a news release on the HHS website. “This Department will do more — a lot more — at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”
“Over time, bureaucracies like HHS become wasteful and inefficient even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent civil servants,” he said.
“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.”
The release said these latest cuts that will realign 28 divisions into 15 divisions and will save $1.8 billion per year as — combined with previous workforce reductions — the department will shrink from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees.
The restructuring will create an Administration for a Healthy America while “ending America’s epidemic of chronic illness by focusing on safe, wholesome food, clean water, and the elimination of environmental toxins,” the release said.
We are streamlining HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective. We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA. This… pic.twitter.com/BlQWUpK3u7
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) March 27, 2025
In a video posted to X, Kennedy said during the Biren era, the HHS budget grew by 38 percent.
“All that money has failed to improve the health of Americans,” he said.
According to a fact sheet posted by HHS, the Food and Drug Administraion will lose about 3,500 positions.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will assume the functions of the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response and then cut about 2,400 jobs, which includes about 1,000 jobs from the ASPR.
The National Institutes of Health will be cut by about 1,200 people.
The department’s 10 regional offices will be reduced to five.
The release said the Administration for a Healthy America will be an amalgamation of existing HHS offices and will function to “improve coordination of health resources for low-income Americans.”
As noted by The Wall Street Journal, Kennedy backed now-President Donald Trump during the election, saying the new administration would “make America healthy again.”
Office of Management and Budget director Russell Vought targeted the CDC in a comment last fall.
“Look at CDC,” he said. “Most of them don’t even do public health. They are researchers that publish material. Who knows if it’s even relevant or not? They even themselves had to admit they were a failure in the public health crisis that comes once in a generation.”
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