Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended the administration’s decision to cut 10,000 jobs at the department on Thursday, confirming that essential employees would remain part of the staff.
“We’re not cutting front line workers, we’re cutting administrators, and we’re consolidating the agency to make it more efficient,” Kennedy said during a Thursday evening appearance on NewsNation’s “CUOMO.”
In addition to the new cuts, HHS is looking to remove an additional 10,000 through severance packages, buyouts and early retirements. Kennedy, in a video shared to social platform X, acknowledged “this will be a painful period for HHS.”
The move would cut a fourth of the department’s workforce, resembling similar reduction in forces at the Department of Education, Department of Veteran Affairs and other agencies in line with President Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) efforts to cut down on “wasteful” spending and overhaul the workforce.
“We have over 100 comms departments. You have 40 procurement departments. We have dozens of IT departments, dozens of HR departments, none of them talk to each other,” Kennedy told host Chris Cuomo.
“And what we’re trying to do now is to streamline the agency, to eliminate the redundancies and to focus the mission so that everybody who is at HHS is going to wake up every morning and say, ‘What am I going to do today to Make America Healthy Again,’ and we’re going to make it easier for those who are not cutting scientists,” he added.
Some have objected to Kennedy’s leadership of the department, citing the former independent presidential candidates’ lack of previous experience in the medical field and anti-vaccine rhetoric.
Former HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said she is concerned about the job cuts and their effect on public health amid funding deductions for research grants through the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
“I’m worried on a lot of fronts,” Sebelius said during The Hill’s “Health Next Summit.”
“The kinds of cuts that were just announced are devastating and will set science back and set research back,” she added.
