The secretary of HUMAN HEALTH AND SERVICES of the United States, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., suggested in the last hours that 20% of the layoffs made in the health area by the government efficiency department (DOGE), led by Elon Muskthey were wrong and that they must be readmitted. “The personnel who should not have been cut, were cut. We are reincorporating them. And that was always the plan. It is part of the doge, what we talked about from the beginning is that we were going to make cuts of 80 %, but 20 % of them will have to be reincorporated because we will make mistakes,” he said Kennedy Jr. in statements to the US press from the state of Virginia.
On Tuesday, around 10,000 employees were fired from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), as part of a restructuring designed by Doge. It was expected that the dismissals reduce the HHS to 62,000 positions, eliminating almost a quarter of their staff through those 10,000 layoffs and another 10,000 workers who had already accepted offers of early retirement and voluntary decoupling. That is a decrease of approximately one third of the total workforce with respect to the approximately 92,620 employees that the department had in September 2024.
A program of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that monitors lead exposure in children was among the tasks that were mistakenly eliminated by layoffs, Kennedy said in the last hours. “Some programs that were trimmed are being restored, and I think this is one of them,” said the former environmentalist who in recent years has concentrated several controversies, especially because of his denialist position with vaccines.
At the moment, it is not clear what sections, areas or departments plan to restore the Department of Health after having recognized the error. In addition to layoffs in federal health agencies, cuts are already beginning to implement cuts in state and local health departments as a result of a measure of the health department last week to withdraw more than 11,000 million dollars in funds related to the fight against the COVID-19 virus.
