US health secretary Robert F Kennedy jnr announced plans to reshape federal public health agencies on Thursday, including cutting 10,000 employees and centralising agency functions.
The job cuts include 3,500 at the Food and Drug Administration, 2,400 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and 1,200 at the National Institutes of Health.
The latest job cuts, and about 10,000 recent voluntary departures, will reduce the number of full-time employees at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to 62,000 from 82,000, the department said.
“Over time, bureaucracies like HHS become wasteful and inefficient even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent civil servants,” Mr Kennedy said in a statement.
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“This overhaul will be a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves. That’s the entire American public, because our goal is to Make America Healthy Again,” he added.
President Donald Trump and billionaire ally Elon Musk, who oversees the Doge cost-cutting initiative, have been gutting agencies as part of an effort to shrink the federal bureaucracy.
Mr Trump ordered all federal agencies earlier this month to draw up plans for a second wave of mass layoffs and the White House began reviewing the plans last week alongside Mr Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.
The planned FDA job cuts would not affect inspectors or reviewers of drugs, medical devices, or food, HHS said.
The terminations are likely to delay drug and medical device application reviews or cause missed deadlines, said Eva Temkin, a lawyer at Arnold & Porter who advises clients on drug and medical device applications. “There’s a real risk that this results in delayed patient access to treatments,” she said.
The Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, currently an independent HHS agency with 1,000 employees, is to be folded into the CDC.
The National Institutes of Health, which is responsible for biomedical and public health research, will see staff reductions across its 27 institutes and centres.
“The only way to cut that high of a percentage of our staff, along with the 35 per cent contracting cuts that are being directed, is to drastically scale back what NIH does across the board,” said Nate Brought, the recently departed director of the NIH’s executive secretariat.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was comparatively spared with a reduction of about 300 employees. It was not immediately clear from which HHS divisions or offices the remaining 2,600 cuts would come.
As part of the restructuring, the department’s 10 regional offices will be cut to five and its 28 divisions consolidated into 15, including a new Administration for a Healthy America, which will combine offices that address addiction, toxic substances and occupational safety into one central office. − Reuters
