The Trump administration Thursday announced a major restructuring of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that will cut 20,000 full-time jobs.
The cuts include employees who have taken the Trump administration’s Fork in the Road offer and early retirement, plus an additional reduction in force of 10,000 jobs. It will take the HHS workforce from 82,000 to 62,000, according to the HHS press release.
The restructuring also includes a reorganization of HHS’s many divisions to reduce them from 28 to 15.
“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,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. said in the press release. “This Department will do more — a lot more — at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”
HHS is the umbrella agency that includes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and other smaller divisions.
The restructuring will include the creation of a new Administration for a Healthy America, or AHA, intended to “more efficiently coordinate chronic care and disease prevention programs.” It will consolidate several existing agencies, with a focus on primary care, maternal and child health, mental health and HIV/AIDS.
The cuts include 3,500 full-time employees at the FDA, 2,400 at the CDC, 1,200 at NIH, and 300 at CMS, according to an HHS fact sheet. It states that the new job cuts at the FDA will not affect drug, medical device, or food reviewers or inspectors. The reorganization will not impact Medicare or Medicaid.
HHS states that the job cuts will save $1.8 billion. The agency currently has a budget of nearly $2 trillion, the majority of which pays for benefits for Americans covered by Medicaid and Medicare.
These cuts align with President Trump’s vision of drastically reducing the size and scope of the federal government — an effort that has been led so far by Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE.
In a social media video posted Thursday morning, Secretary Kennedy characterized HHS as a dysfunctional, sprawling bureaucracy.
In the video, he vacillated between praising his department’s staff and their work and accusing them of harming Americans’ health.
“When I arrived, I found that over half of our employees don’t even come to work,” he said. (HHS did not immediately respond to a question about whether the employees were in approved teleworking arrangements, placed on administrative leave or something else.)
“HHS has more than 100 communications offices and more than 40 IT departments and dozens of procurement offices and nine H.R. departments. In many cases, they don’t even talk to each other.”
He described “little fiefdoms” within HHS of being “so insulated and territorial that they actually hoard our patient medical data and sell it for profit to each other,” though he didn’t offer further details.
“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,” he said, without naming the divisions or industries he was referencing.
Senator Angela Alsobrooks, D-Md., wrote in a statement that the plan to cut 20,000 jobs from HHS was “dangerous and deadly.” Many health agencies are headquartered in Maryland, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the National Institutes of Health.
Alsobrooks also confronted Kennedy during his confirmation hearing about comments he’d made asserting that the childhood vaccine schedule should be adjusted depending on a child’s race.
“These mass layoffs at Health and Human Services will cost human lives,” Alsobrooks said. “I will do all I can to fight this.”
“There is a benefit to occasional reorganizations of HHS. But, this is also about big staff and program reductions,” Larry Levitt of the nonpartisan health research organization KFF wrote on social media.
“A lot of what HHS employees do is behind the scenes oversight, to prevent fraud and abuse and ensure health care programs provide the services promised. Reductions in the federal workforce could result in more wasteful spending down the road.”
Have information you want to share about the ongoing changes across federal health agencies? Reach out to these authors via encrypted communications: Selena Simmons-Duffin @selena.02, Pien Huang @pienhuang.88 and Rob Stein @robstein.22.
