The Department of Health and Human Services confirmed on Thursday that around 10,000 full -time employees will soon lose their jobs, in addition to the almost 10,000 that the agency has already left in recent months through purchase offers or early retirement.
That places the total number of employees in around 62,000 people, below 82,000 at the beginning of the Trump administration. The Agency supervises the Food and Medicines Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Medicare and Medicaid service centers, among other divisions.
The building of the Department of Health and Human Services is seen in Washington, on April 5, 2009.
Alex Brandon/AP
“We are not only reducing bureaucratic expansion. We are realigning the organization with its main mission and our new priorities to reverse the epidemic of chronic diseases,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. in a statement on Thursday.
“This review will be a winner for taxpayers and for those who serve HHS. That is the entire American public, because our goal is to make the United States again healthy,” Kennedy said.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Peaks such as President Donald Trump organizes a cabinet meeting in the White House Cabinet room, on March 24, 2025, in Washington.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP through Getty Images
Kennedy said that the last cuts will save taxpayers $ 1.8 billion per year. The cuts will reduce the number of regional offices, from 10 to five. It will also combine the current 28 divisions in HHS in 15 divisions, including a new focused on the “Make America Again Again” movement of Kennedy, which will be called the administration of a healthy America.
“We are going to eliminate a complete soup of the alphabet of departments and agencies, while preserving their main functions by merging them into a new organization called Administration for a healthy America,” Kennedy said in a video video explaining the cuts.
Despite cutting almost a quarter of the agency, the department maintains that restructuring will not affect the “critical services.”
However, the impact of the real world of the most recent round of cuts, however, remains to be seen. The cuts have already reached the main researchers at the Alzheimer’s Research Center and Alzheimer’s disease detectives that identify new infectious diseases.
ABC News’ Will McDuffie contributed to this report.
