The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is planning to dismiss 10,000 employees as part of a massive restructuring effort, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Thursday, in a push to consolidate more agency functions under Kennedy’s purview.
In total, HHS will reduce staff from the current 82,000 full-time employees to 62,000. The agency will seek to cut 10,000 jobs through layoffs, while the rest will come through buyouts, early retirement and the administration's “Fork in the Road” offer.
Kennedy said HHS’s 28 divisions will be consolidated to 15, and 10 regional offices will become five. The agency will also create a new Administration for a Healthy America (AHA), which Kennedy said will coordinate chronic care and disease prevention programs.
“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 in a statement. “This Department will do more — a lot more — at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”
The overhaul will focus on Kennedy’s priority of ending chronic illness “by focusing on safe, wholesome food, clean water, and the elimination of environmental toxins,” HHS said in the release.
“We’re going to do more with less,” Kennedy said in a speech posted to X, while acknowledging “this will be a painful period for HHS.”
But Kennedy claimed the consolidation will make the departments more accountable "to you, the American taxpayer and the American patient.”
Kennedy in his speech noted the HHS budget has increased and its staffing has increased, but despite that growth, life expectancy has gone down and chronic disease rates have increased.
HHS said the restructuring will save taxpayers $1.8 billion per year and “serve multiple goals without impacting critical services.”
The staffing cuts will hit the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) the hardest.
According to an agency fact sheet, the FDA will decrease its workforce by approximately 3,500 full-time employees but the administration said it won’t impact drug or medical device reviews.
The CDC will decrease its workforce by approximately 2,400 employees, with a focus on preparing for and responding to epidemics and outbreaks.
Updated: 11:28 a.m.
