Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on March 27 announced major changes at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), including the merging of some divisions, in a bid to become more efficient.
“We are going to streamline HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective,” Kennedy said in a video statement.
Kennedy said 28 HHS divisions will become 15 as some are merged and that the full-time HHS workforce will be reduced by about 25 percent from 82,000 workers.
“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said in a department statement.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who oversees the DOGE cost-cutting initiative, have been gutting agencies as part of an effort to shrink the federal bureaucracy.
The HHS plan involves cutting 3,500 full-time employees at the Food and Drug Administration, the department said in a fact sheet breaking down the cuts, adding that the cuts would not affect inspectors or drug, medical device, or food reviewers.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will see 2,400 staff cut and the Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, currently an independent HHS agency with 1,000 employees, folded into it.
The National Institutes for Health will see a reduction of 1,200 employees across its 27 institutes and centers, the breakdown showed. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services was comparatively spared with a reduction of about 300 people.
As part of the restructuring, 28 units of the department will be consolidated into 15 new divisions, including a new ‘Administration for a Healthy America’, or AHA.
AHA will combine offices in HHS that address addiction, toxic substances and occupational safety, among others, into one central office, the agency said.
Kennedy said that the transition will be painful but that “we are going to do more with less.”
WATCH:
We are streamlining HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective. 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… pic.twitter.com/BlQWUpK3u7
— Secretary Kennedy (@SecKennedy) March 27, 2025
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