Amid The Measles Outbreak, HHS Cuts 1/8th Of Workforce
The measles outbreak that began in Texas continues at a brisk pace. RFK Jr. and his Department of Health and Human Services, as we’ve discussed, continues to make the outbreak worse through a combination of public opining on alternative treatments that are making some even sicker, garbled messaging that seeks to downplay the severity of the outbreak, and the Secretary’s inability to simply tell people to get the MMR vaccine so we can be done with all of this. There have been 22 new cases in Texas in the last five days alone, a number that is almost certainly underreported. Health experts are getting worried, particularly as the measles has an unhappy side effect of causing immune amnesia, which can severely disrupt a person’s immunity from infection via prior infection or vaccine for a wide variety of other diseases. A sort of gateway virus that can then expose the victim to many other diseases they should be protected against.
Honestly, if anyone would be keen on preventing an epidemic or pandemic in 2025, you would think it would be Donald Trump, given how the COVID-19 pandemic played a heavy role in his losing his reelection bid in 2020.
So what is HHS under RFK Jr. doing while all of that is going on? Slashing 1/8th of HHS’ workforce, of course. And, as is typical for him and the department under his leadership, he’s dribbling the communications around those cuts down his leg, as well.
Kennedy’s silence is prompting questions from Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike, with a bipartisan request for President Donald Trump’s health secretary to appear before a Senate committee next week to explain the cuts.
As many as 10,000 notices were sent to scientists, senior leaders, doctors, inspectors and others across the department in an effort to cut a quarter of its workforce. The agency itself has offered no specifics on which jobs have been eliminated, with the information instead coming largely from employees who have been dismissed.
RFK Jr. has said he would come before Congress quarterly to answer their questions. The bipartisan request to appear in a congressional hearing call that out. And, yet, RFK Jr. has not agreed to appear at the time of this writing. There is already reporting that the White House is furious with Kennedy and the department, particularly as the White House has had to invest more time in communications for the department than any other in the Executive Branch.
Since the measles debacle, the White House communications team has handled more press relations on behalf of HHS than any other department, and often has acted as a contact between reporters and the agency.
“This shouldn’t be the White House’s job, but here we are,” a White House adviser said.
These cuts, part of an effort to shave roughly 0.1% of the HHS budget, will have an impact on public health. And not just on the current measles outbreak, but on all kinds of things.
In every corner of the FDA, and at sister health agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, thousands of workers, specialists, and scientists were slapped with Department of Government Efficiency pink slips Tuesday morning.
A top scientist on the FDA’s bird flu response team – gone.
The leader of Makary’s tobacco unit – gone.
To borrow part of a phrase, slashing employees that power American healthcare at the tail end of a pandemic and perhaps at the starting line of a new epidemic is exactly the wrong thing to do… but, here we are. A vaccine skeptic with all kinds of crackpot health theories has been put in charge of American healthcare because he said nice things about Donald Trump. If measles does indeed become an epidemic, or worse, any blood from it will be squarely on the hands of Kennedy and Trump.
Frightening though it may be to think it, one move to watch out for is the administration ceasing to report the number of infections from measles, the bird flu, or any other disease that might rear in the near future. Either a purposeful refusal to report those numbers or, more likely, a byproduct of staff reductions could result in all of us being far less informed, and far less safe, than we are today.