Kennedy: Cutting to the bone at HHS
"'Make America Healthy Again' actually means the opposite," said Jonathan Cohn in The Bulwark. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. this week began laying off 10,000 HHS employees, in addition to 10,000 who've left voluntarily—a combined 25 percent workforce reduction that will make Americans more vulnerable. Kennedy is gutting the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health. Other divisions, handling everything from job safety to toxic substances, are merging into a new unit, the Administration for Healthy America, that will give Kennedy even greater control. We're losing programs that are working, like federal substance abuse aid that has cut overdose deaths by 24 percent in 12 months, saving 27,000 lives. Instead of curbing overdoses and infectious diseases, Kennedy is "going after vaccines."
An HHS "shake-up was past due," said Ryan Long in National Review. The department is "bloated, redundant, and misaligned" with our needs. Yet if "shrinking HHS makes sense," Kennedy is doing so in a way that "vindicates his critics," said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. He tapped anti-vaccine crusader David Geier to study already-debunked links between vaccines and autism, sending a signal that he plans to "push out scientists who don't toe Kennedy's anti-vaccine line." No surprise that the FDA's vaccine chief, Peter Marks, quit this week, saying that Kennedy wanted only "subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies."
These cuts also raise "questions about 'MAGA math,'" said Brett Arends in MarketWatch. Savings from the layoffs account for 0.5 percent of President Trump's proposed tax cuts and 0.2 percent of the $1 trillion Elon Musk promised he'd cut. HHS is the government's most expensive department. If such "radical surgery" saves so little, where will the rest of the money come from? No amount of savings can justify these actions, said Liza Featherstone in The New Republic. Bird flu and measles are raging while the administration slashes HHS. Kennedy has even suggested letting bird flu "run wild among the nation's flocks." The administration is also cutting cancer research, "working hard to undo" progress made with government funding. From deadly diseases to the opioid crisis to health research, this administration seemingly thinks "preventing mass death isn't really government's business anymore." It has essentially "committed itself to an enthusiastically pro-death agenda."