RFK Jr.'s callous purge of public health staffers puts us all at risk
The Department of Health and Human Services, led by anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy, has kicked off a sweeping round of layoffs, cutting roughly 10,000 employees as part of a so-called reorganization effort, which was announced last week.
With these cuts—alongside resignations and workers who took President Donald Trump’s buyouts—HHS has now shrunk by nearly a quarter, leaving just 62,000 positions, according to the Associated Press. This marks yet another devastating blow to the federal workforce under Trump: Just last week, the president signed an executive order aiming to revoke the collective bargaining rights of most federal workers.
“We are streamlining HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective,” Kennedy wrote alongside a video posted to social media, announcing the layoffs last week. “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 overhaul will improve the health of the entire nation—to Make America Healthy Again.”
But that supposed efficiency comes at a steep cost. Some of the top experts at the Food and Drug Administration and National Institutes of Health—scientists and public health officials responsible for drug approvals, disease prevention, and medical research—received their termination notices on Tuesday morning, according to various reports.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/4/1/2313874/-RFK-Jr-s-callous-purge-of-public-health-staffers-puts-us-all-at-risk
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