- Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans 10,000 job cuts at his department.
- The reductions could affect teams that respond to disease outbreaks, approve drugs and help people with their insurance coverage.
- Kennedy has repeatedly criticized the department he now leads.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to slash 10,000 full-time employees across different departments, as he works to reshape the nation’s federal health agencies, the department said Thursday.
Those job cuts are in addition to about 10,000 employees who opted to leave HHS since President Donald Trump took office, through voluntary separation offers. Combined, they will lead to the federal health department shedding about a quarter of its workforce, shrinking it to 62,000 employees.
HHS is a $1.7 trillion agency that oversees vaccines and other medicines, scientific research, public health infrastructure, pandemic preparedness and food and tobacco products. The department also manages government-funded health care for millions of Americans – including seniors, disabled people and lower-income patients who rely on Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act’s markets.
The department will cut jobs at divisions responsible for offering insurance to the poorest Americans, approving new drugs, and responding to disease outbreaks, according to The Wall Street Journal, which earlier reported the cuts.
The major restructuring comes as the U.S. grapples with one of the worst measles outbreaks in more than two decades, and as bird flu spreads in wild birds worldwide and is causing outbreaks in poultry and U.S. dairy cows, with several recent human cases.
HHS will also drop five of its 10 regional offices, but it said essential health services won’t be affected.
“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. “This Department will do more – a lot more – at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”
The department said the cuts will save the government about $1.8 billion per year. The federal government spent roughly $6.8 trillion in fiscal 2024.
Here are the employees the Trump administration plans to cut, according to the Journal:
- 3,500 full-time employees from the Food and Drug Administration, or about 19% of its workforce
- 2,400 workers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or roughly 18% of its staff
- 1,200 employees from the National Institutes of Health, or about 6% of its workforce
- 300 workers from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or roughly 4% of its employees
As part of the restructuring, Kennedy is consolidating the department’s 28 current divisions into 15 new ones, which HHS said will “centralize core functions” such as human resources, information technology, procurement, external affairs and policy.
