RFK Jr. Announces Plan to Terminate 20,000 HHS Employees and Restructure Department

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is delivering a much-needed gut punch to the bloated federal bureaucracy. On Thursday, Kennedy announced a sweeping restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services, beginning with the termination of 20,000 employees and the elimination of wasteful redundancies that have plagued the agency for decades.

In alignment with President Trump’s Executive Order to implement the Department of Government Efficiency Workforce Optimization Initiative, Kennedy is making good on his promise to bring order, efficiency, and accountability back to public health governance.

“What I found when I came to HHS is really a sprawling bureaucracy,” Kennedy told host Michael Knowles. “We have over 100 communications departments we should have one. We have 40 IT departments, 40 procurement departments, dozens of HR departments.”

Key takeaways from Kennedy’s bold overhaul include:

• Immediate workforce reduction from 82,000 to 62,000 employees, with an estimated $1.8 billion in annual taxpayer savings.

• A new streamlined entity, the Administration for a Healthy America (AHA), which will consolidate several agencies into one unified body focused on health outcomes for low-income Americans.

• Strengthening of the CDC, which will absorb the disaster response functions from ASPR to reinforce its public safety mission.

• Creation of an Assistant Secretary for Enforcement, to aggressively combat fraud and abuse across Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal health programs.

Importantly, Kennedy emphasized that frontline scientists and providers will not be affected by the cuts. “We’re keeping the scientists, we’re keeping the front-line providers,” he said. “We’re trying to do our best, not only to serve as stewards of the taxpayer money, but also to make the agency more efficient.”

The restructuring is already being praised as one of the most significant overhauls of a federal agency in modern history. Gone are the days when bureaucrats padded departments with pointless divisions and overlapping roles. Kennedy’s approach dubbed internally as “DOGE meets HHS” reflects the Trump administration’s commitment to lean, effective government.

For decades, HHS ballooned into a maze of inefficiency, shielded by layers of unaccountable management and misaligned priorities. Under RFK Jr., that stops now.

Additional components of the plan include:

• A merger of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) with the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), creating a new Office of Strategy to align research directly with policy goals.

• Reorganization of the Administration for Community Living (ACL), with support programs for seniors and the disabled integrated into other HHS divisions for improved delivery without impacting Medicare or Medicaid.

The left will predictably wail about “draconian” cuts, but the reality is simple: the American people are sick of funding endless bureaucracy that produces nothing but confusion and inefficiency. RFK Jr.’s focus is on restoring HHS to its core mission public health and gold standard science not bloated payrolls and politically motivated pet projects.

If this is what the Trump administration means by “draining the swamp,” they’re off to an excellent start.

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