It seems like not a day has gone by since January 20th that we haven’t woken up to news of a Trump Cabinet officer ordering deep cuts in their department or nuking massive amounts of fraud, waste and abuse uncovered by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
On Thursday, it was HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s turn, and he has some major cuts of his own:
The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is planning to dismiss 10,000 employees as part of a massive restructuring effort, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Thursday, in a push to consolidate more agency functions under Kennedy’s purview.
In total, HHS will reduce staff from the current 82,000 full-time employees to 62,000. The agency will seek to cut 10,000 jobs through layoffs, while the rest will come through buyouts, early retirement and the administration’s “Fork in the Road” offer.
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
This overhaul will improve the health of the entire nation — to Make America Healthy Again.
The reorganization will help Kennedy focus more on his priories, including perhaps his top goal, tackling what he deems a chronic disease epidemic in America:
Kennedy said HHS’s 28 divisions will be consolidated to 15, and 10 regional offices will become five. The agency will also create a new Administration for a Healthy America (AHA), which Kennedy said will coordinate chronic care and disease prevention programs.
“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.”
Some celebrated the news on social media:
RFK just fired another 10,000 HHS employees
This is on top of 10,000 who already quit
You know what we call 20,000 fewer woke
employees at HHS?A good start pic.twitter.com/wNlDSyPSw8
— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) March 27, 2025
Trump is bringing something we don’t see too much in modern times—a reduction in the federal workforce. Already he and his Cabinet have cut (or are planning to cut) hundreds of thousands of jobs across multiple departments and agencies, including the IRS, USAID, the Education Department, Agriculture, the CIA, the EPA, FEMA and more.
