Employees of the Massive Department of American Health and Social Services began to receive dismissal notices on Tuesday in A redesign finally expected to dismiss up to 10,000 people. Opinions come only a few days after President Donald Trump has moved to the workers of their Collective negotiation rights to HHS and other government agencies.
The Secretary of Health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announced last week a plan to redo the department, which, through his agencies, is responsible for monitoring health trends and disease epidemics, the realization and financing of medical research and monitoring of food and drug safety, as well as the administration of health insurance programs for almost half of the country.
The plan would consolidate agencies that would supervise billions of dollars to Toxicomania services And community health centers under a new office called administration for healthy America.
Releases should reduce HHS to 62,000 jobs, reducing nearly a quarter of its staff – 10,000 jobs through layoffs and 10,000 other workers who have taken early retirement and voluntary separation offers.
Washington’s Democratic Senator Patty Murray predicted that the cuts will have ramifications when natural disasters strike or infectious diseases, such as the Epidemia of measles in progresspropagated.
“They can just as well rename him from the Ministry of Disease because their plan puts lives in serious danger,” Murray said on Friday.
Beyond dismissals in federal health agencies, the cuts are starting to occur in the health and local health services due to a HHS move last week to withdraw more than $ 11 billion in silver related to COVID-19. Local health and state officials are still evaluating the impact, but some health services have already identified hundreds of jobs that are to be eliminated due to lost money, “some of them overnight, some of them have already disappeared,” said Lori Tremel Freeman, General Manager of the National Association of Health Managers of the County and the City.
The union representatives of HHS employees received Thursday that 8,000 to 10,000 employees will be dismissed. The Department of the Ministry will target posts in human resources, purchases, finance and information technologies. The positions in the “high cost regions” or which have been deemed “redundant” will be at the center of dismissals.
Kennedy criticized the department he supervises as an ineffective “sprawling bureaucracy” in a video announcing restructuring on Thursday. He said the annual budget of 1.7 dollars from the ministry, “failed to improve the health of the Americans”.
“I want to promise you now that we are going to do more with less,” said Kennedy.
Thursday, the department provided a ventilation of certain cuts.
__ 3,500 jobs at Food and Drug AdministrationWho inspects and establishes safety standards for medicines, medical devices and food.
__ 2400 jobs in the centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which monitors infectious epidemics and works with public health agencies.
__ 1,200 jobs at the National Institutes of Health, the world’s leading health and medical research establishment.
__ 300 jobs for centers for medicare and medicaid services, which oversees the market for the Act respecting affordable care, medicare and medicaid.
At the CDC, most of the employees have not been unionized, but interest has increased sharply this year because the Trump administration has taken measures to reduce the federal workforce. About 2,000 CDC employees in Atlanta belonged to the local local negotiation unit of employees of the US employees, with hundreds of others who had asked to join in recent days.
But Thursday evening, Trump signed a executive decree that would be Final collective negaine For a large number of federal agencies, including CDC and other health agencies.
The erosion of collective negotiation rights has been criticized by certain Democratic legislators.
“President Trump’s cheeky attempt to abolish the majority of federal employees from their union rights deprives these workers from their hardened protections,” the representatives Gerald Connolly and Bobby Scott, both of Virginia, said on Friday in a joint statement.
“This will only give Elon Musk more power to dismantle the people’s government with as little resistance from dedicated officials as possible – more weakening the ability of the federal government to serve the American people.”
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The writer Associated Press Amanda Seitz in Washington and Mike Stobbe in New York contributed. ___
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