Efficiency? RFK Jr says 20% of DOGE’s health agency job cuts were mistakes
Around a fifth of the 10,000 jobs cut from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) were done in error and will need to be corrected, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has admitted.
Mass layoffs from the health department began this week amid a push by Donald Trump’s administration to shrink the size of the federal government workforce. Union representatives were told around 10,000 people were to lose their jobs ahead of further reductions that could see the department’s 82,000-strong workforce slashed by nearly a quarter.
But Kennedy, the former environmental lawyer and vaccine skeptic turned Trump ally, has said that a large slice of the layoffs by Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) are mistaken.
“Personnel that should not have been cut, were cut,” Kennedy told reporters on Thursday. “We’re reinstating them. And that was always the plan. Part of the Doge, we talked about this from the beginning, is we’re going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstated, because we’ll make mistakes.” [Continue reading…]
When HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Thursday that he planned to rehire 20 percent of the employees he’d just terminated, he insisted such a move was “always the plan.”
Turns out, it wasn’t the plan at all.
HHS has no intention of reinstating any significant number of the staffers fired as part of a mass reduction-in-force on Tuesday, despite Kennedy’s assertion that some had been mistakenly cut, a person familiar with the department’s plans told POLITICO.
The layoffs eliminated roughly 10,000 jobs across HHS, gutting several public health offices and purging prominent senior scientists from the Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health. They came after the department had already jettisoned 10,000 people who took early retirement and voluntary separation offers encouraged by the Trump administration.
Kennedy at the time called the cuts necessary to refocus and improve HHS, even as he acknowledged it was a “difficult moment.” Yet on Thursday, he appeared to signal that some of those firings would be walked back.
“Personnel that should not have been cut were cut — we’re reinstating them, and that was always the plan,” Kennedy said, indicating that CDC officials focused on monitoring lead exposure levels among children would be among those brought back. “The part of that, DOGE — we talked about this from the beginning — is we’re going to do 80 percent cuts but 20 percent of those are going to have to be reinstalled because we’ll make mistakes.”
But contrary to Kennedy’s vow, his team had no expectation of reinstating anywhere near 20 percent of the fired workers.
“No such plan is in the works,” said the person familiar, who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. [Continue reading…]