Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a sweeping restructuring of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), cutting 10,000 jobs and shutting down entire agencies. The move, which Kennedy described as a necessary step to eliminate inefficiency, will reduce the department’s workforce from 82,000 to 62,000.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Our lifespan has dropped, so Americans now live six years shorter than Europeans.
00:06We are the sickest nation in the world, and we have the highest rate of chronic disease.
00:11The entire federal workforce is downsizing now, so this will be a painful period for
00:17HHS as we downsize from 82,000 full-time employees to around 62,000.
00:24Our department is filled, for the most part, with competent, conscientious public servants,
00:29and yet the agency has been inefficient as a whole.
00:32Hey, everybody, I'd like to share with you a paradox that I've encountered here in Washington,
00:38D.C. as the new secretary of HHS.
00:41Our department is filled, for the most part, with competent, conscientious public servants,
00:46and yet the agency has been inefficient as a whole.
00:50Over the past four years during the Biden administration, HHS's budget increased by
00:5538 percent, and its staffing increased by 17 percent, but all that money has failed
01:01to improve the health of Americans.
01:04In fact, the rate of chronic disease and cancer increased dramatically as our department has
01:10grown.
01:11Our lifespan has dropped, so Americans now live six years shorter than Europeans.
01:16We are the sickest nation in the world, and we have the highest rate of chronic disease.
01:22The U.S. ranks last among 40 developed nations in terms of health, but we spend two to three
01:27times more per capita than those nations.
01:30As secretary, I now understand why all this money is not improving our health.
01:35HHS is a sprawling bureaucracy that encompasses literally hundreds of departments, committees,
01:42and other offices.
01:44You know how bureaucracies work.
01:46Every time a new issue arises, they tack on another committee.
01:50This leads to tremendous waste and duplication, and worst of all, a loss of any unified sense
01:55of mission.
01:56The resulting pandemonium has injured American health and damaged department morale.
02:03When I arrived, I found that over half of our employees don't even come to work.
02:07HHS has more than 100 communications offices and more than 40 IT departments and dozens
02:13of procurement offices and nine HR departments.
02:17In many cases, they don't even talk to each other.
02:20They're mainly operating in silos.
02:22Sometimes these sub-agencies work at cross-purposes with each other.
02:27Some of these little fiefdoms, for example, are so insulated and territorial that they
02:31actually hoard our patient medical data and sell it for profit to each other.
02:38Instead of remedying the chronic disease crisis, perverse incentives have administrators checking
02:42boxes and creating their own homework while public health declines.
02:47A few isolated divisions are neglecting public health altogether and seem only accountable
02:52to the industries that they're supposed to be regulating.
02:56In one case, defiant bureaucrats imputed the secretary's office from accessing the closely
03:02guarded databases that might reveal the dangers of certain drugs and medical interventions.
03:07I have some good news, though.
03:09As part of President Trump's Doge workforce reduction initiative, we're going to streamline
03:14HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective.
03:19We're going to imbue the agency with a clear sense of mission to radically improve the
03:23health of Americans and to improve agency morale.
03:28We're going to eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments and agencies while preserving
03:33their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration
03:39for a Healthy America, or AHA.
03:41We have two goals.
03:42The first is obvious, to save the taxpayer money by making our department more efficient.
03:47And the second is to radically improve our quality of service.
03:51I want to promise you now that we're going to do more with less.
03:56No American is going to be left behind.
03:59Our key services delivered through Medicare and Medicaid, the FDA and CDC, and other agencies
04:06will enter a new era of responsiveness and a new era of effectiveness.
04:11We're going to consolidate all of these departments and make them accountable to you, the American
04:16taxpayer and the American patient.
04:19These goals will honor the aspirations of the vast majority of existing HHS employees
04:24who actually yearn to make America healthy.
04:27Twenty-eight great divisions will become 15.
04:31The entire federal workforce is downsizing now, so this will be a painful period for
04:36HHS as we downsize from 82,000 full-time employees to around 62,000.
04:45We're keenly focused on paring away excess administrators while increasing the number
04:50of scientists and front-line health providers so that we can do a better job for the American
04:55people.
04:56We're going to streamline our agency and eliminate the redundancies and invite everyone to align
05:01behind a simple, bold mission.
05:04I want every HHS employee to wake up every morning asking themselves, what can I do to
05:10restore American health today?
05:13I want to empower everyone in the HHS family to have a sense of purpose and pride and a
05:19sense of personal agency and responsibility to this larger goal.
05:23We're going to save taxpayers nearly $2 billion a year, and we're going to return HHS to its
05:28original commitment to public health and gold standard science.
05:33I want this agency to be once again a revered scientific institution that once made HHS
05:40the envy of the world.
05:41I want everyone who works here to be proud of this agency, to be proud of their work,
05:46to feel a renewed inspiration and their own sense of responsibility for our success in
05:52restoring America to good health.
05:55Streamlining HHS is part of a shift to new priorities, especially ending the chronic
06:00disease epidemic with clean water, safe food, effective medicine, good science, radical
06:07transparency, and a healthy environment.
06:10I think most Americans would agree with me that throwing more money at health care isn't
06:14going to solve the problem, or it would have solved it already.
06:18Obviously, what we've been doing hasn't worked.
06:21That's why we're making this dramatic overhaul, but the real overhaul is even bigger.
06:26The real overhaul is improving the health of the entire nation to make America healthy again.