Robert F. Kennedy Jr., US Secretary for Health and Social Services (HHS), at a meeting from the Cabinet to the White House in Washington, DC, United States, Monday, March 2025.
Samuel Corum | Bloomberg | Getty images
The Secretary of Health and Social Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., plans to reduce 10,000 full -time employees in various departments, while working to reshape the country’s federal health agencies, the ministry announced on Thursday.
These job cuts are added to around 10,000 employees who have chosen to leave HHS since President Donald Trump took office, thanks to voluntary separation offers. Combined, they will lead to the Federal Health Department to lose around a quarter of its workforce, reducing it to 62,000 employees.
HHS is an agency of $ 1.7 billion that oversees vaccines and other drugs, scientific research, public health infrastructure, pandemic preparation and food and tobacco products. The ministry also manages health care funded by the government to millions of Americans – including the elderly, people with disabilities and low -income patients who count on Medicare, Medicaid and the markets of the affordable care law.
The ministry will reduce jobs in divisions responsible for insurance to the poorest Americans, the approval of new drugs and the response to disease epidemics, according to the Wall Street Journal, which previously reported the cuts.
The main restructuring occurs while the United States is struggling with one of the worst measles epidemics in more than two decades, and while the bird flu spreads into wild birds in the world and causes epidemics in dairy and American cows, with several recent human cases.
The HHS will also drop five of its 10 regional offices, but it said that essential health services will not be affected.
“We are not only reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We realign the organization with its main mission and our new priorities in the inversion of the chronic disease epidemic,” said Kennedy. “This department will be more – much more – at a lower cost for the taxpayer.”
The ministry said the cuts allowed the government to save around $ 1.8 billion a year. The federal government spent around 6.8 dollars in the year 2024.
Here are the employees that the Trump administration plans to cut, according to the newspaper:
- 3,500 full-time employees of Food and Drug Administration, or about 19% of his workforce
- 2,400 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or about 18% of its staff
- 1,200 employees of the National Institutes of Health, or about 6% of his workforce
- 300 workers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or around 4% of its employees
As part of the restructuring, Kennedy consolidates the 28 current divisions of the ministry in 15 short stories, which, according to HHS, “centralize the basic functions” such as human resources, information technologies, supply, external affairs and politics.
Among them is a new subdivision called the administration for a healthy America, which will combine offices in HHS which deal with dependence, toxic substances, mental health and professional security, among others, in a single central office. This includes the office of the Deputy Secretary for Health, Health Resources and Services Administration, to the administration of drug and mental health services, agency for the register of toxic substances and diseases and the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.
HHS said that the combination of these agencies “will improve the coordination of health resources for low-income Americans” and focus on areas such as primary care, maternal and child health, mental health, environmental health, HIV / AIDS and the development of labor.
The administration of preparation and strategic response, which is responsible for the national response in the event of a disaster and planning the preparation for pandemics, will move under the CDC. Currently, ASPR is its own operational division in HHS.
Larry Levitt, executive vice-president of KFF health policy, said that there was an advantage in the occasional HHS reorganizations to achieve better coordination and efficiency “, which occurred within the framework of republican and democratic administrations.
But he told CNBC that the plans are “not only a reorganization of HHS” because they involve reducing the federal workforce, which will ultimately affect government services.
“Persons and health care providers may be waiting longer to get help and answer their questions, which will lead to frustration and delays in services,” said Levitt. “A large part of what HHS employees are doing is behind the scenes, working to prevent fraud and abuse and guarantee that health care programs provide the services they promise. With fewer people watching the store at HHS, problems will start to appear.”
Kennedy is reducing American health policy
Before being confirmed, Kennedy undertook to end what he calls “corporate corruption” in federal health agencies and to serve the staff when he entered his role in the Trump administration.
He had said that he would eliminate the “whole departments” from the FDA, saying that workers who are preparing for approval of several controversial or doubtful treatments should prepare to “pack their bags”.
Kennedy, a prominent vaccination skeptic, has made early movements that could have an impact on immunization policy and further reduce absorption in the United States at a time when infant vaccination rates decrease.
He said he would examine the childhood vaccination calendar and would have prepared to withdraw and replace members of the external committees who advise the government on the approvals of vaccines and other key public health decisions, among other efforts.
His so-called Make Make America Sain Again platform also undertakes to end the chronic illness epidemic in children and adults. Kennedy has expressed the manufacture of nutritious foods, rather than drugs, at the heart of this objective.