Photo: Library of Congress
The already marginal U.S. health care system is being rocked by massive cuts in staff at the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS.
On Tuesday, HHS began to layoff thousands of employees across its departments, a downsizing that will reduce its workforce by about 25 percent, from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees. The cuts include early retirements and Fork in the Road offers plus 10,000 additional jobs from layoffs.
“With cruelty to individuals and a sledgehammer, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr continues the evisceration of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other HHS agencies and his consolidation of control over the department and its agencies,” Robert Steinbrook, M.D., health research group director for Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy group, said in a statement.
“Kennedy’s actions are a colossal blunder that if unchecked may destroy the FDA, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other agencies as we have known them,” Steinbrook said. “There are widespread consequences for medical research, drug and medical device safety, and the prevention of disease.”
Senseless is an understatement, he said about the cuts to HHS staff and programs.
Americans care about food safety, which led to the passage of the 2010 Food Safety Modernization Act, Sarah Sorscher, director of regulatory affairs for the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group, said in a statement. It shifted the national approach from reacting to outbreaks to preventing them.
Last week’s announcement appeared to exempt the FDA’s drug, biologics, and device centers, so what’s left to cut at the FDA is food, Sorscher said, adding non-inspection food programs are most likely to be targeted.
Much of the work the FDA human foods program do is to prevent outbreaks by enforcing rules and translating lessons learned from past outbreaks into standards and guidance for industry, she said. For example, during the covid-19 pandemic, when the FDA placed many inspections on hold, an infant formula facility in Sturgis, Michigan, went uninspected, as conditions developed that would lead to a deadly multistate outbreak of Cronobacter and a nationwide formula shortage.
Sorscher also has concerns inspection will be harmed because many are conducted under state grants that have already been targeted for cuts, approaching as much as 60 percent.
In the HHS restructuring, its 28 divisions will be consolidated into 15 new divisions, including a new Administration for a Healthy America and will centralize functions such as human resources, information technology, procurement, external affairs, and policy. Regional offices will be reduced from 10 to 5.
Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, said the changes at HHS aren’t about fiscal responsibility – it’s a deliberate attack on science to fund massive tax giveaways for billionaires such as Donald Trump and Elon Musk.
“The FDA, CDC, and NIH are essential to protecting public health, from safeguarding our food to advancing critical disease research,” Cook said in a statement. “These agencies do the important public health work that the private sector can’t or won’t do, because there isn’t any profit to be made.”
Rebuilding what RFK Jr. and Trump are destroying will take a generation or longer to rebuild – if ever, he said.
