Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Thursday plans to reduce the Ministry of Health and Social Services, reducing almost a quarter of his workforce in a major restructuring which will consolidate several departments.
According to the Ministry of Health, cuts will save $ 1.8 billion per year and – combined with the reduction of previous workforce – will reduce the staff of 82,000 to 62,000 full -time employees.
Under a restructuring plan, the number of health service divisions will go from 28 divisions to 15 – including a new administration for a healthy America, or AHA. The number of regional offices will go from 10 to five.
“We are not only reducing bureaucratic sprawl,” the secretary of health said in a statement. “We realize the organization with its main mission and our new priorities in the inversion of the chronic disease epidemic. This department will be more – much more – at a lower cost for the taxpayer. ”
Many in the national and global health community have acquired for dramatic changes from Kennedy, an opponent of certain vaccines and a stronger food security defender, took office by walking a radical reform.
The main target of Kennedy cuts is the Food and Drug Administration, which works to ensure the safety and efficiency of food, drugs, medical devices, tobacco and other regulated products. It will reduce its workforce by 3,500 full -time employees – a reduction that a health service information sheet Said “will not affect drugs, medical devices or food examiners, and this will have no impact on inspectors.”
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a large agency of $ 9 billion which strives to prevent chronic diseases, to combat epidemics of infectious diseases and to make vaccine recommendations, will also reduce 2,400 employees.
Dr. Tom Frieden, the former director of the CDC who now works as president and chief executive officer of non -profit health organization resolves to save lives, said that Kennedy's plans are not translated into greater efficiency.
“The rupture of the agency by sending experts to non -transmitted diseases to another new agency is not effective, it simply creates a new bureaucracy,” said Frieden in a statement to the Times. “Infectious diseases do not occur in a vacuum, and factors, including pre -existing chronic diseases, play a critical role in understanding and controlling infectious diseases.”
The CDC, said Frieden, was the “flagship product of public health for generations” because it continued its “basic mission to save lives and protect people from health threats of all kinds”.
“No other part of the federal government has the depth and extent, understanding and support of communities and suppliers to stop our main killers,” said Frieden. “The CDC has contributed to saving millions of lives – not only from infectious diseases but also cancer, heart attack, brain vascular accidents and other causes of death of the deaths of Americans; Better road safety; and injury prevention and drug overdose. “
The National Institutes of Health, the main agency of the federal government to conduct and support medical research, will reduce 1,200 employees.
A former NIH official and Critique of the Trump administration said that the reductions would have great -reaching consequences.
“You cannot cut as many people without having radically resized resigned Last month of his post as director of the NIH Executive Secretariat. “It's just not possible.”
Said it feared that research on the LGBT community and that AIDS will be completely cut and that cancer and infant disease studies are waving.
“We have already seen them reduce the assistance of HIV and AIDS and, to a certain extent, research, and now I would not be surprised to see most of it also disappear,” he said. “Research on cancer, I think, is enormous … Everything that addresses the cup of any infantile disease will obviously be a huge problem. I do not think that the Americans speak of children who die of desire to achieve their political goals.”
In an address published on the social media platform X Thursday, Kennedy painted a dark and apocalyptic image of the American Health Department, noting that as its budget and its staff increased, all this money failed to improve the health of the Americans.
“In fact, the rate of chronic diseases and cancer has increased considerably as our department has developed,” he said. “Our lifespan has dropped. Thus, Americans are now living six years shorter than Europeans. We have the most sick nation in the world, and we have the highest chronic disease rate. The United States ranks among 40 developed countries in terms of health, but we spend two to three times more by Capita than these countries. ”
Kennedy described his department as a “sprawling bureaucracy” and ineffective “which had seen cancer and chronic disease rates increase as its budget increased.
“When I arrived, I found that more than half of our employees do not even come to work,” said Kennedy. “HHS has more than 100 communication offices and more than 40 IT departments and dozens of supply offices and nine HR services. In many cases, they don't even talk to each other. They operate mainly in their silos. ”
During Biden administration, Kennedy said the Ministry of Health’s budget increased by 38% as staff increased by 17%.
“But all this money failed to improve the health of the Americans,” he said.
Dorit Reiss, professor of law at UC San Francisco, specialized in public health, questioned the premise that the country's health agencies were in overexploitation.
“If anything, the FDA and the CDC lack staff, they do not have as many people as they need to fight the many challenges we face,” she said, and noted that the nation was in the midst of an epidemic of measles. “This is not the right time to cut the organization on the front line of combat.”
The new administration for a healthy America – which, according to an information sheet, “will more effectively coordinate chronic care and disease prevention programs and harmonize health resources to low -income Americans” – will have several divisions, including primary care, maternal and child health, mental health, environmental health, HIV / AIDS and labor.
Kennedy admitted that his overhaul of the department would be a “painful period” for the agency. But he said he wanted all employees to gather together “behind a simple and daring mission”.
“I want each HHS employee to wake up every morning asking me:” What can I do to restore American health today? ” I want to allow everyone in the HHS family to have a sense of objective and pride and a sense of the personal agency and the responsibility of this broader objective.
However, said the government had never been less effective than in Trump administration.
“At this point, morale is at a rate of all time, productivity is a hollow of all time, then you will throw something like that over it,” he said.
“People who are constantly informed that they are about to be dismissed, that their jobs are in danger,” he added, “do not do their best, as well and as well as they are capable and as they were before.”
