Health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. plans to dramatically reshape the department he leads through mass layoffs and consolidation of the sprawling agency that provides health insurance to tens of millions of Americans, responds to disease outbreaks and oversees the safety of medical devices and pharmaceutical drugs.
Ten thousand full-time employees at the Department of Health and Human Services will be laid off under Kennedy’s plans, which were announced Thursday morning. The planned terminations are in addition to the roughly 10,000 employees who have left the HHS through other Trump administration efforts, such as offers of early retirement. All told, the department will have shrunk in size by about 25% to about 62,000 full-time employees.
The Food and Drug Administration, which houses the Center for Devices and Radiological Health, will lose about 3,500 full-time employees, according to the HHS. The department said the “reduction will not affect drug, medical device, or food reviewers, nor will it impact inspectors.”
Advamed, one of the medical device industry’s largest lobbying groups, said in a statement Thursday morning that the organization agrees with Kennedy’s goal to ensure the HHS and other federal health agencies are more “efficient and accountable.”
“My understanding is that FDA experts whose entire mission is to improve and not stand in the way of patient access to innovative medtech will not be affected. This is good news,” Advamed CEO Scott Whitaker wrote. “Looking forward, our view is that any reduction in force should be accompanied by policy and regulatory improvements that encourage innovation in medtech.”
The HHS will also centralize many functions that are currently spread out across the department, consolidating work involving human resources, information technology, procurement and policy. The number of HHS regional offices will be cut in half to five, and the department’s 28 divisions will be reduced to 15.
Among those 15 divisions will be a new “Administration for a Healthy America,” which will merge several different offices and administrations into a new unit that handles issues like maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS and environmental health. Kennedy, in throwing his support behind President Donald Trump during the election, has championed the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, a broad political coalition that’s questioned healthcare orthodoxy and focused on the rise of chronic disease in the U.S.
“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 in a statement. “This Department will do more — a lot more — at a lower cost to the taxpayer.”
The reorganization will save taxpayers $1.8 billion annually, according to HHS. Medicare, Medicaid and other essential health services will remain intact, the agency said, although it didn’t offer further details in its Thursday morning statement.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which decides coverage of new medical technology for Medicare beneficiaries, will lose about 300 employees.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will lose about 2,400 employees, although it will gain about 1,000 staff currently employed at the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, which CDC will now absorb. The National Institutes of Health’s workforce will be reduced by 1,200 employees.
Kennedy, in a video statement posted to the social media platform X, said this will be a “painful period for HHS,” but insisted throughout the video that the cuts and restructuring were necessary to improve the department’s efficacy and efficiency.
“HHS is a sprawling bureaucracy that encompasses literally hundreds of departments, committees and other offices. You know how bureaucracies work: Every time a new issue arises, they take on another committee,” Kennedy said. “This leads to tremendous waste and duplication and, worse of all, a loss of any unified sense of mission. The resulting pandemonium has injured American health and damaged department morale. "
Kennedy’s plans for HHS follow a directive from the Trump administration to all government agencies to prepare large-scale reductions in force. Agency heads had been ordered to prepare the first phase of their plans by March 13.
The cuts to HHS and other health agencies come as new leaders are taking over, or are expected to in the near future. FDA Commissioner Martin Makary was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on Tuesday. Meanwhile, Dr. Mehmet Oz had his nomination to run the CMS advanced by a Senate committee to a full chamber vote yesterday, putting him one step closer to taking over the agency.
These agency-level restructurings also coincides with a barrage of cost-cutting initiatives directed by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, spearheaded by billionaire Elon Musk. DOGE, at Trump’s behest, has sought to shrink the government wholesale by closing offices, laying off staff and freezing billions of dollars in funds.
Ostensibly meant to make the government more efficient, Trump administration initiatives have frozen large tracts of biomedical research, eroded disease monitoring programs and weakened oversight of fraud in federal healthcare programs, according to impacted employees.
Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional detail throughout.
