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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced Thursday that his efforts to streamline the agency would be kicked into high gear as his team works to eliminate “the entire alphabet soup of departments” disrupting operational efficiency.
“When I arrived, I found that over half of our employees don’t even come to work,” he said in a video statement.
“HHS has more than a hundred communications offices and more than 40 IT offices and dozens of procurement offices, and nine HR departments,” Kennedy continued. “In many cases, they don’t even talk to each other…sometimes these subagencies work at cross-purposes with each other.”
He explained that these types of territorial departments sometimes hoard patient medical data and “sell it for profit to each other.” Kennedy expressed his frustration that HHS, rather than focusing on remedying the chronic disease epidemic in America, has been more focused on “checking boxes and grading their own homework while public health declines.”
Kennedy further said that “defiant bureaucrats – he did not offer names – “impeded” the secretary’s office by blocking access to databases related to certain dangers possibly linked to specific drugs.
The good news, Kennedy revealed, was that thanks to President Donald Trump’s DOGE workplace reduction initiative, “we’re going to streamline the HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective.”
Kennedy explained that the “alphabet soup” of agencies would be eliminated, but core functions would be preserved by merging them into a brand-new, singular agency called the Administration for a Healthy America, or AHA.
“We have two goals, the first is obvious: to save the taxpayer money by making our department more efficient,” he said. “And the second, is to radically improve our quality of service.”
Kennedy committed to doing “more with less” and vowed to ensure “no American is going to be left behind.”
Here are some of the core functions Kennedy promised to streamline:
- Services delivered through Medicare, Medicaid, FDA, CDC, and other key agencies – which Kennedy said would enter a new era of effectiveness and responsiveness,
- Consolidation of departments, which he envisioned making accountable to the American taxpayer and American patient,
- Reduce 28 HHS divisions into 15,
- Reduce HHS full-time work staff from over 82,000 to around 62,000,
- Focusing on “paring away excessive administrators while increasing the number of scientists and frontline health providers.”
Kennedy emphasized his desire to ensure HHS employees could unite behind a “simple, bold mission” and challenged them to wake up every morning and ask, “What can I do to restore American health today?”