The Department of Health and Human Services will cut an additional 10,000 full-time employees, bringing total reductions to nearly a quarter of the federal workforce responsible for Americans’ health.

HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr., who rose to prominence as the leader of the world’s largest anti-vaccine activist group before taking control of the US health system, announced Thursday the cuts would save $1.8 billion annually from the agency’s $2 trillion budget – a cost reduction of 0.09% in exchange for a loss of 20,000 total employees.

“I think most Americans would agree with me that throwing more money at healthcare isn’t going to solve the problem, or it would have solved it already,” Kennedy said in an address posted to social media. “Obviously, what we’ve been doing hasn’t worked.”

The cuts are part of an all-out assault by the Trump administration on the federal workforce overseen by billionaire Elon Musk and his pseudo agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, HHS said in a media release. 

“The entire federal workforce is downsizing now, so this will be a painful period for HHS as we downsize from 82,000 full-time employees to around 62,000,” Kennedy said, describing the agencies he oversees as “pandemonium,” “fiefdoms,” and a “sprawling bureaucracy.”

Despite cutting thousands of government programs, billions in grants, and eliminating tens of thousands of federal jobs, the Trump administration has so far failed to slow spending, with the US government spending more during Trump’s first month than during the same period last year.

“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said. “This Department will do more – a lot more – at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”

‘All that money’

We are streamlining HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective. We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA. This… pic.twitter.com/BlQWUpK3u7

— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) March 27, 2025

The Biden-era budget expansions had targeted initiatives related to pandemic preparedness, mental health, and public health infrastructure.

Critics argue these workforce reductions will harm Americans’ access to healthcare while yielding minimal savings. Kennedy and HHS have already been under fire for mass firings, failure to respond to a measles outbreak that has killed the first two Americans in over a decade, and billions in medical research cuts.

Senator Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, blasted the decision on social media: “RFK Jr. wants to cut 10,000 more jobs at HHS. People are waiting too long and paying too much for care. Meanwhile, this Administration is cutting grants for lifesaving medical research and fighting to cut Medicaid—all to pay for billionaire tax breaks. It’s outrageous.”

Americans already pay the highest amount per capita for healthcare globally, spending nearly double its OECD counterparts and up to four times more than health systems in South Korea, New Zealand and Japan. Despite these costs, the United States remains the only high-income nation without universal health coverage.

More significant than staffing numbers in America’s healthcare cost crisis is the inability of US taxpayers to negotiate fair prices with pharmaceutical companies that wield enormous influence in Washington. Prescription drugs frequently cost two to four times more in the US than in Canada, the European Union, or Mexico.

HHS oversees all major US health agencies, including the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Food and Drug Administration. The vast majority of HHS funding supports Medicare and Medicaid, which provide healthcare coverage for elderly, disabled, and low-income Americans.

“We are going to do more with less,” Kennedy added. “No American will be left behind.”

Health in Trump’s image

Across federal agencies, the Department of Health and Human Services is undergoing perhaps the most profound ideological transformation, reflecting the priorities of both President Trump and Kennedy.

Internal memos obtained by news agencies reveal an expanding list of scientific topics the National Institutes of Health now “no longer supports” – including research on vaccine hesitancy, COVID-19, diversity initiatives, climate change health effects, and transgender healthcare.

Since Kennedy’s appointment, HHS agencies have terminated hundreds of previously approved scientific studies.

Among the hundreds of terminated studies are grants that reveal a clear ideological pattern in the administration’s scientific priorities: investigations into Alzheimer’s disease in sexual and gender minority older adults, mental health interventions for LGBTQ+ communities affected by COVID-19, strategies to improve vaccine acceptance among Alaska Native populations, and research examining how institutional trust influences vaccine decisions—representing just a fraction of studies canceled for addressing topics now disfavored by Kennedy’s HHS.

In a particularly controversial move, the administration announced this week it would close its office for long COVID research, leaving millions of Americans suffering from the poorly understood condition without hope for scientific advances on treatments or causes.

While defunding established medical research areas, the Kennedy-led HHS is simultaneously redirecting resources toward investigating purported links between vaccines and autism – connections that have been systematically discredited through decades of rigorous scientific study.

“We are going to return HHS to its original commitment to public health and gold-standard science. I want this agency to be once again a revered scientific institution,” Kennedy declared, despite appointing David Geier to lead the vaccine-autism studies – a figure with no medical education who has been barred by multiple states for practicing medicine without a license.

Geier and his father gained notoriety for treating autistic children with a prostate cancer drug that causes chemical castration, among other experimental and unproven treatments they administered to more than 600 children with autism nationwide.

“It’s like hiring Andrew Wakefield,” Dorit Reiss, a law professor at UC Law San Francisco and expert on anti-vaccine movements, told STAT News. Wakefield is the discredited British doctor whose retracted 1998 Lancet article falsely claiming MMR vaccines cause autism is widely considered the foundation of modern anti-vaccine activism.

“My first-hand experience over the recent troubling weeks convinced me that Kennedy and his team are working to bend science to fit their own narratives, rather than allowing facts to guide policy,” Kevin Griffis, who stepped down last week as director of the CDC’s office of communications, wrote in an editorial explaining his departure. “In my final weeks at the CDC, I watched as career infectious-disease experts were tasked with spending precious hours searching medical literature in vain for data to support Kennedy’s preferred treatments.”

The ideological reconfiguration extends beyond research priorities. Earlier this month, executive orders mandating the removal of the word “gender” from federal websites resulted in the temporary deletion of crucial public health resources covering adolescent health, HIV monitoring and testing, contraception guidance, and environmental health data. The pages were only restored after judicial intervention.

The administration has also imposed sweeping restrictions on language permitted in federally funded research grants, prohibiting terms as fundamental as “socioeconomic difference,” “women,” “climate change,” “bias,” “equity,” and “ethnicity” – effectively censoring entire fields of scientific inquiry.

Separately, the administration’s vast cuts to federal support for health research have been challenged in court by attorneys general from nearly half of America’s states.

The scientific exodus prompted by these policies has been so significant that European countries and universities have established “scientific asylum” programs specifically targeting American researchers fleeing what many describe as ideologically driven censorship.

On the global stage, the Trump administration has withdrawn from international health cooperation, eliminating all funding for Gavi, the vaccine alliance that helps low-income countries access essential vaccines for preventable diseases, while simultaneously reducing support for USAID’s global health initiatives.

“I left my job because I believe public health policy must always be guided by facts and not fantasy,” Griffis wrote. “It is painful to say this, given my time in government service, but the United States urgently needs a strong alternative to the government public health guidance it has relied on in the past.”