The Trump administration on Thursday introduced an enormous layoff of 10,000 workers on the Well being and Human Companies Division, as a part of a dramatic reorganization designed to convey communications and different features immediately underneath the purview of Well being Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The layoffs, reported earlier by The Wall Road Journal, are a drastic discount in personnel for the well being division, which now employs about 82,000 individuals. Along with earlier layoffs, the transfer will convey the division right down to about 62,000, the company mentioned.
The restructuring will embody creating a brand new division referred to as the Administration for a Wholesome America, which Mr. Kennedy mentioned will go by the acronym A.H.A. “We’re going to do extra with much less,” he mentioned, whilst he acknowledged it could be “a painful interval for H.H.S.”
The 28 divisions of the well being company can be consolidated into 15 new divisions, in line with an announcement issued by the division. Mr. Kennedy introduced the modifications in a YouTube video.
Mr. Kennedy’s division touches the lives of each American. By means of its varied companies — together with the Facilities for Illness Management and Prevention, the Meals and Drug Administration and the Nationwide Institutes of Well being — it regulates medicine, displays meals security, tracks infectious illness and conducts biomedical analysis.
All of these companies have campuses exterior of Washington and have a tendency to function underneath their very own authority, and Mr. Kennedy has been at odds with all of them. Mr. Kennedy assailed them, and different elements of the division, in his video.
“After I arrived, I discovered that over half of our workers don’t even come to work,” he claimed. “H.H.S. has greater than 100 communications workplaces and greater than 40 I.T. departments and dozens of procurement workplaces and 9 H.R. departments. In lots of instances, they don’t even discuss to one another. They’re primarily working within the silos.”
