Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Wednesday announced the firing of 10,000 federal health workers, including dramatic cuts to agencies that keep Americans safe from diseases and possible future pandemics.
The vaccine skeptic and ally of President Trump said the workforce of the Department of Health and Human Services will be slashed from 82,000 to 62,000 after thousands of other officials already accepted buyouts in an austerity push engineered by billionaire Elon Musk.
“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,” Kennedy said.
RFK Jr. said the layoffs would save about $1.8 billion in annual spending.
A longtime critic of the agencies he now leads, Kennedy had vowed to make deep cuts in health agencies that he says are corrupt or in the pockets of Big Pharma and food processing companies.
The Health and Human Services department has been responsible for monitoring infectious diseases, inspecting foods and hospitals and overseeing health insurance programs for nearly half the country.
Despite the big shake-up, the DHHS will also create a new division called the “administration for a healthy America,” an apparent nod to Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again slogan.
Trump and Musk, who is oversees the massive federal austerity push through the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” are gutting whole agencies as part of an effort to shrink the federal bureaucracy.
Most of the planned cuts will come from the nation’s public health agencies,.
The Food and Drug Administration, responsible for setting standards for Americans’ foods and medications, will shed 3,500 workers, while the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracks infectious disease outbreaks, will cut 2,400 positions.
Meanwhile, the National Institutes for Health, the world’s leading public health research agency, will lose 1,200 people. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees health coverage for older and poor Americans, will shed 300 jobs.
Officials insisted that none of the cuts will put the public in danger or raise the risk of disease or new pandemics.
RFK Jr. has been a fierce critic of vaccines for decades and has earned lucrative commissions by steering plaintiffs to law firms suing vaccine-makers that he now regulates.
He has downplayed a deadly measles outbreak in west Texas, which doctors say was caused by low vaccination rates, and falsely blamed poor nutritional practices.
