Last week, Donald Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education after firing or laying off half its workforce, around 2,000 people. Now, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced his department of Health and Human Services will eliminate 10,000 full-time positions in addition to the 10,000 who’ve left voluntarily through early retirement offers. The HHS roster will drop from 82,000 to 62,000 employees, and its divisions will go from 28 to 15.
The Trump administration has promised to reduce the size of government, and it’s proceeding at pace. Kennedy is citing cost savings, at $1.8 billion a year, and streamlining a “dysfunctional” bureaucracy as reasons for the job cuts. But critics like Larry Leavitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, a health policy organization, warn that such deep cuts affect the department’s capacity for oversight and program or service delivery.
Kennedy has set out to remake US health policy in line with his Make America Healthy Again movement. Ian Bremmer, founder and president of Eurasia Group, has said the MAHA movement is “a worldview that blends concerns about corporate influence on healthcare with skepticism towards mainstream medicine.” It also leans heavily on vaccine hesitancy, conspiracy theory, and alternative medicine.
“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl,” Kennedy said in a statement about the restructuring. “We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” he added, confirming that MAHA is firmly the order of the day at HHS.