Layoffs begin at US health agencies in effort to ‘streamline’ HHS
WASHINGTON (TNND) — Employees with the Health and Human Services Department began receiving notices of dismissal Tuesday after it was announced Thursday that 10,000 more full-time workers would be cut across different departments.
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said last week that the layoffs would streamline the agency to make it “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,” Kennedy said in a video announcing the cuts. “This overhaul will improve the health of the entire nation — to Make America Healthy Again.”
The layoffs are in addition to the roughly 10,000 employees who opted to leave once Kennedy took over the agency, bringing the department from 82,000 employees down to about 62,000.
Union representatives for HHS employees received a notice Thursday that 8,000 to 10,000 employees will be terminated. The department’s leadership will target positions in human resources, procurement, finance and information technology. Positions in “high cost regions” or that have been deemed “redundant” will be the focus of the layoffs.
Kennedy criticized the department as an inefficient “sprawling bureaucracy” in the video, adding the department’s $1.7 trillion yearly budget, “has failed to improve the health of Americans.”
“I want to promise you now that we’re going to do more with less,” he said.
A breakdown of some of the cuts include:
- 3,500 jobs at the Food and Drug Administration, which inspects and sets safety standards for medications, medical devices and foods.
- 2,400 jobs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which monitors for infectious disease outbreaks and works with public health agencies nationwide.
- 1,200 jobs at the National Institutes of Health, the world’s leading health and medical research institution.
- 300 jobs at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the Affordable Care Act marketplace, Medicare and Medicaid.
