Credit: Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images
US Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. emerges from the office of the Speaker of the House of Representatives at the US Capitol on March 25, 2025.
The largest federal health agency in the US is slated to shrink significantly through workforce cuts and department consolidations.
US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced in a video statement posted to X Thursday morning that his agency would reduce headcount from 82,000 employees to 62,000 and consolidate 28 divisions into 15. HHS oversees the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), along with several smaller divisions that deal in everything from health-care access to substance use disorder treatment.
Of the 20,000 people Kennedy said would leave HHS, about half of those have already left the agency through early retirement or voluntary separation incentives.
“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,” Kennedy says in the statement. “We're going to consolidate all of these departments and make them accountable to you, the American taxpayer and the American patient. These goals will honor the aspirations of the vast majority of existing HHS employees who actually yearn to make America healthy.”
HHS says in a fact sheet that the FDA will decrease its workforce by about 3,500 full-time employees, mostly in operations and administrative functions. It adds that drug, medical device, and food reviewers and inspectors will not be impacted. The FDA media office referred all questions about specifics to the HHS.
The CDC expects workforce cuts in the realm of 2,400 people. The Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), an HHS subagency geared toward disasters and public health emergencies, will be moved under the CDC as part of that restructuring. A CDC spokesperson was not immediately able to provide information about what projects might be affected at the organization. CMS, meanwhile, will lose around 300 employees.
The NIH workforce is set to be cut by about 1,200 employees. Per the fact sheet, the cuts will be achieved “by centralizing procurement, human resources, and communications across its 27 institutes and centers.” An NIH spokesperson referred all inquiries for specifics to HHS.
A researcher at the NIH, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of professional repercussions, had not yet received news internally about plans to restructure the agency as of Thursday morning, less than an hour after Kennedy's video statement published.
As part of its broader restructuring, the NIH had previously moved to centralize peer review that used to take place across multiple institutes and centers, which a fired former employee, speaking on condition of anonymity, called “a [bellwether] for a major reduction in NIH grant funding in the future.”
Kennedy's HHS will establish a new umbrella organization called “Administration for a Healthy America,” or AHA, that will consolidate multiple subagencies working in substance use disorder, health care for uninsured Americans, and occupational health and safety.
The HHS will also appoint an assistant secretary for enforcement who will be tasked with overseeing Medicare appeals and civil rights claims "to combat waste, fraud, and abuse," per the fact sheet.
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, spearheaded by Elon Musk, was critical in devising the restructuring plan. DOGE officials were on-site at the NIH earlier this week, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said during a hearing about the impacts of NIH funding cuts on Wednesday.
The slash-and-burn approach at NIH isn't being led by scientists or anyone who knows the first thing about biomedical research. It is being led by Elon Musk's DOGE, which has arbitrarily cut funding without consideration of the effects on research and patients.
Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI)
DOGE has already come under fire for helping sow chaos among federally-funded researchers, who've had grant payments disrupted over the last several weeks. "The slash-and-burn approach at NIH isn't being led by scientists or anyone who knows the first thing about biomedical research. It is being led by Elon Musk's DOGE, which has arbitrarily cut funding without consideration of the effects on research and patients," Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) said during Wednesday's hearing. "President Trump and Elon Musk's DOGE are callously ripping away treatments and cures from millions of Americans suffering from Alzheimer's disease, cancer, ALS and other devastating diseases, and we are here today to sound the alarm."
Jeremy Berg, a biochemist at the University of Pittsburgh who previously directed the National Institute for General Medical Sciences at NIH, compared the Trump administration’s approach to starting surgery before confirming a diagnosis. “It seems that the administration is skipping most of the early steps and just skipping to a rushed treatment plan,” he wrote. “How will the[y] know that efficiency and effectiveness have been achieved?”
Chemical & Engineering News
ISSN 0009-2347
Copyright © 2025 American Chemical Society
You might also like...
Advertisement