Robert F. Kennedy Jr., under the guise of Making America Healthy Again, is operating under the assumption that cutting HHS to the bone is the important thing there.
“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. This Department will do more, a lot more, at a lower cost to the taxpayer,” said Kennedy, the Health and Human Services Secretary, as he announced on Thursday that the department will cut another 10,000 jobs from its workforce.
A taxpayer-funded HHS press release tells us this will save us $1.8 billion a year, though actually, that savings is going to count against the Trump/Musk tax cuts for billionaires, so we’re still going to come out on the short end on the savings line.
We also get the short end of the stick with the bureaucratic reshuffling, which is cutting the number of HHS divisions and regional offices in half, and this latest 10,000-employee reduction brings the total number of HHS employees jettisoned in the past two months to 20,000.
The Trump/Musk administration started out on Jan. 20 with the 82,000 employees in HHS inherited from the Biden/Harris administration.
In addition to cutting staff by 25 percent, RFK Jr.’s HHS has been cutting money for medical research, including cancer research.
The PR people at HHS somehow suppressed laughter as they included in the presser announcing the latest cuts a line about how the cuts will “implement the new HHS priority of ending America’s epidemic of chronic illness by focusing on safe, wholesome food, clean water, and the elimination of environmental toxins.”
They’re cutting staff and cancer research, and giving us a meme.
Wonderful.
“They’re taking a hatchet to medical research for cures to diseases and gutting the workforce that administers Medicare and Medicaid and supports individuals with disabilities and new moms. And they’re drastically undercutting our ability to fight future epidemics, if they should arise, and present-day health crises including the opioid epidemic and massive strains on America’s mental health infrastructure. Meanwhile RFK Jr. is bringing in a team of kooks, loons, and weirdos to throw out sound science on vaccines that has saved tens of millions of lives. The American people will undoubtedly suffer harmful consequences if this plan is carried out,” Northern Virginia Congressman Don Beyer said.
And it’s all being done, remember, so that the Elon Musks of the world can get their grubby hands on even more money that they don’t need.
“President Trump is so dead set on funding tax giveaways for billionaires that he’s scrambling to cut corners within the federal government, even if that means risking the health and well-being of Americans that rely on Medicare, Medicaid, and critical research initiatives by slashing HHS. That’s despicable, and the American people see right through it,” said U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., a member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
I’m not sure enough people “see right through it.”
Even people who are going to feel it, when their cancer treatments are canceled midstream, and the answer is, here, drink this cup of water that we’re claiming is clean, except that, you have to take our word on that, because we also gutted the EPA.
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Chris Graham
