OAN Staff James Meyers
7:59 AM – Thursday, March 27, 2025
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) announced that it’s cutting close to 10,000 full-time employees.
The department made the announcement on Thursday, and it will slash about a tenth of the staff at the nation’s federal health agencies.
“When combined with HHS’ other efforts, including early retirement and Fork in the Road, the restructuring results in a total downsizing from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees,” the department said in a release, estimating that Americans would save $1.8 billion from the cuts.
Nevertheless, Health and Human Services Secretary (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will also reportedly slash 3,500 jobs from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and 2,400 from the Centers for Disease and Control Prevention (CDC).
“This reduction will not affect drug, medical device, or food reviewers, nor will it impact inspectors,” the HHS fact sheet says of the FDA changes.
In total, with other Trump administration cuts, including early retirement and buyout offers — an estimated 20,000 people will be leaving the health department, the HHS said.
Kennedy also noted this week that the DOGE team had “identified extraordinary waste in my department and HHS.”
According to Kennedy, multiple divisions across the HHS had “too much duplicated work” and agency heads are still working to cut wasteful spending.
“We are with Elon’s help eliminating the redundancies.” Kennedy said Monday.
Additionally, Kennedy has proposed creating a new group of agencies called “the Administration for a Healthy America,” which he says will save money and “radically improve our quality of service.”
“We’re going to imbue the agency with a clear sense of mission to radically improve the health of Americans and to improve agency morale. We’re going to eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments and agencies while preserving their core functions,” Kennedy said in the Thursday video.
The Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, which was elevated into a separate agency under the Biden administration to oversee tasks such as pandemic related issues, will be absorbed into the CDC.
Furthermore, the Work from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which was expecting to have almost 90% of their employees cut by DOGE — will now be merged with another currently unnamed separate agency, thus creating “the Office of Strategy.”
“The entire federal workforce is downsizing now. So this will be a painful period for HHS,” Kennedy acknowledged in his remarks.
Kennedy emphasized that the agency was “focused on paring away excess administrators while increasing the number of scientists and frontline health providers.”
“We’re going to streamline our agency and eliminate redundancies and invite everyone to align behind a simple, bold mission: I want every HHS employee to wake up every morning asking themselves, ‘what can I do to restore American health today,'” he added.
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