No scalpel needed — this calls for major surgery. Due to the years of politicization and corruption at the Department of Health and Human Services, Donald Trump’s HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is looking to cut thousands of jobs from the bloated and too-often authoritarian agency.
In a video he shared on X, Kennedy discussed “a paradox,” namely, the HHS employees who are “competent, conscientious public servants,” while the agency itself is “inefficient.” As part of his reforms, therefore, Kennedy will readjust HHS priorities, seek objectively scientific solutions instead of pushing the newest pharma industry products, and cut thousands of bureaucrats.
Kennedy explained, “During the Biden administration, the HHS budget increased by 38% and its staffing increased by 17%, but all that money has failed to improve the health of Americans. In fact, the rate of chronic disease and cancer increased dramatically as our department has grown. Our lifespan has dropped so Americans now live six years shorter than Europeans.”
America has “the highest rate of chronic disease” and “ranks last among 40 developed nations in terms of health, but we spend two to three times more per capita than those nations.” That is due to a “sprawling bureaucracy that encompasses literally hundreds of departments, committees, and other offices,” creating committees instead of focusing on results. HHS is unconstitutional, but if it is not going to be shut down, at the very least, it should stop wasting taxpayer money, which is a goal of Kennedy’s.
Secretary Kennedy has officially announced the cut of 20,000 workers! https://t.co/QaetPEEauh pic.twitter.com/UP7SdneZvu
— American Values 🗽 (@AVPac_US) March 27, 2025
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In fact, Kennedy accused HHS and subsidiaries of “tremendous waste and duplication and worst of all, a loss of any unified sense of mission, resulting in pandemonium has injured Americans’ health and damaged department morale. When I arrived, I found that over half of our employees don't even come to work. HHS has more than 100 communications offices and more than 40 IT departments and dozens of Procurement Offices, and nine HR departments. In many cases, they don't even talk to each other… sometimes these sub agencies work at cross purposes with each other.”
Some even sell patient data “for profit to each other,” Kennedy added. “Instead of remedying the chronic disease crisis, perverse incentives have administrators checking boxes and creating their own homework while public health declines. A few isolated divisions are neglecting public health altogether and seem only accountable to the industries that they're supposed to be regulating. In one case, defiant bureaucrats impeded the secretary's office from accessing the closely guarded databases that might reveal the dangers of certain drugs and medical interventions.”
So DOGE and Kennedy will "streamline HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective.”
The Trump officials will “imbue the agency with a clear sense of mission to radically improve the health of Americans and to improve agency morale.” That includes eliminating some subsidiary departments and agencies “while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for Healthy America or AHA.”
Kennedy aims “to save the taxpayer money by making our department more efficient,” while “radically improv[ing] our quality of service… Our key services delivered through Medicare and Medicaid, the FDA and CDC, and other agencies will enter a new era of responsiveness and a new era of effectiveness.” From now on, HHS will be “accountable to you, the American taxpayer and the American patient,” Kennedy said, claiming that most HHS employees acquiesce in this aim.
So “28 great divisions will become 15,” and HHS will “downsize from 82,000 full-time employees to around 62,000.” Kennedy is “keenly focused on paring away excess administrators while increasing the number of scientists and frontline health providers so that we can do a better job for the American people.”
He hopes that each HHS employee will ask, “What can I do to restore American health today?” If successful, the reforms will “save taxpayers nearly $2 billion a year, and we're going to return HHS to its original commitment to public health and gold standard science… ending the chronic disease epidemic with clean water, safe food, effective medicine, good science, radical transparency and a healthy environment.”
Kennedy was right to say, “I think most Americans would agree with me that throwing more money at healthcare isn't to solve the problem, or it would have solved it already. Obviously, what we've been doing hasn't worked. That's why we're making this dramatic overhaul, but the real overhaul is even bigger. The real overhaul is improving the health of the entire nation.”
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