Kennedy remains silent on 10,000 lost jobs in the best health service in the country

By Amanda Seitz

Washington (AP) – Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. offered no new details on Wednesday on its massive restructuring of the United States Ministry of Health and Social Services, the day after thousands of layoffs that fell off through its agencies, avoiding whole offices of the country in certain cases.

Kennedy’s silence encourages questions to the Republican and Democratic legislators, with a bipartite request for President Donald Trump’s health secretary to appear before a senatorial committee next week to explain the cups.

Up to 10,000 opinions have been sent to scientists, senior leaders, doctors, inspectors and others from the department in order to reduce a quarter of his workforce. The agency itself did not offer any specificity on which the jobs was eliminated, the information coming rather from the employees who were dismissed.

“This overhaul is to realign HHS with its main mission: to stop the chronic illness epidemic and make America again healthy,” said Kennedy on social networks, in his only comments on layoffs so far. “It is a winner for taxpayers and for each American that we serve.”

The decision, said the ministry, is expected to save $ 1.8 billion in the annual budget of $ 1.7 billion of the agency – approximately one tenth of 1%.

The ministry did not publish the final number, but last week said that it planned to eliminate 3,500 jobs from the Food and Drug Administration, 2,400 jobs for Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 1,200 of the National Institutes of Health. Public health experts and the best democrats have made alarms on how deep cuts – around 25% of the department – will affect the safety of food and prescription, medical research and prevention of infectious diseases.

It is still not clear why some jobs have been eliminated and others have been spared.

While the cuts were underway on Tuesday, the senator of Louisiana Bill Cassidy, republican, and the senator of Vermont Bernie Sanders, an independent who caucus with the Democrats, sent a letter to Kennedy calling him before the Senate health committee. In a press release, Cassidy said Kennedy’s appearance was part of his promise to appear quarterly before the Committee.

“It will be a good opportunity for him to set the record straight and to speak to the objectives, the structure and the advantages of the proposed reorganization,” the Cassidy statement said.

Representative Diana Harshbarger, a Tennessee Republican, said the Chamber’s health subcommittee also had questions about job cuts.

“We will discover what the layoffs consisted – 10,000 – we did not know,” said Harshbarger on Wednesday in a health care forum organized by Politico. “We will discover what was the premise for these layoffs.”

During the same event, the employee of the special government Calley means, an advisor close to Kennedy who worked in the White House, defended the cups. However, he had a hard time offering an explanation on how the redesign will improve the health of the Americans. Some of his statements have encountered cries and whistles.

“The system is really on the wrong track,” said later means that it wants to see more NIH research.

Dasha Burns of Politico has put pressure on how NIH would do more research with fewer employees of the agency, who had dismissed more than 1,000 NIH scientists and other staff members before this week’s layoffs. Trump’s republican administration has drawn hundreds of NIH grants and has delayed hundreds of millions of dollars in continuous research funds or new studies, including for cancer studies and to keep Alzheimer’s centers across the country.

Means replying by asking: “Has financing the NIH has been reduced?”

This story has been corrected to show that savings are about 1%tenth, not around 1%.

The writer Associated Press Lauran Neergaard in Washington contributed.

Originally published: April 2, 2025 at 1:36 p.m.