Employees across U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday began receiving notices of dismissal in a major overhaul expected to lay off up to 10,000 people.
The development came after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announced plan last week to remake the HHS, which is responsible for tracking health trends and disease outbreaks, conducting and funding medical research, monitoring the safety of food and medicine, and administering health insurance programs for nearly half of the country.
The layoffs are expected to shrink HHS to 62,000 positions, yanking off nearly a quarter of its staff.
Beyond layoffs at federal health agencies, cuts are beginning to happen at state and local health departments as a result of an HHS move last week to pull back more than $11 billion in COVID-19-related funds.
Local and state health officials are still assessing the impact, but some health departments have already identified hundreds of jobs that stand to be eliminated because of lost funding, “some of them overnight, some of them are already gone,” said Lori Tremmel Freeman, chief executive of the National Association of County and City Health Officials.
Union representatives for HHS employees received a notice Thursday that between 8,000 to 10,000 employees will be terminated. The department’s leadership will target positions in human resources, procurement, finance and information technology. Positions in “high cost regions” or that have been deemed “redundant” will be the focus of the layoffs.
Kennedy criticized the department he oversees as an inefficient “sprawling bureaucracy” in a Thursday video announcing the restructuring, and said the department’s $1.7 trillion yearly budget, “has failed to improve the health of Americans.”
“I want to promise you now that we’re going to do more with less,” Kennedy said.
HHS on Thursday provided a breakdown of some of the cuts.
__ 3,500 jobs at the Food and Drug Administration, which inspects and sets safety standards for medications, medical devices and foods.
__ 2,400 jobs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which monitors for infectious disease outbreaks and works with public health agencies nationwide.
__ 1,200 jobs at the National Institutes of Health, the world’s leading health and medical research institution.
__ 300 jobs at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which oversees the Affordable Care Act marketplace, Medicare and Medicaid.
