The Trump administration on Thursday announced a massive layoff of 10,000 employees at the Health and Human Services Department, as part of a dramatic reorganization designed to bring communications and other functions directly under the purview of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The layoffs, reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, are a drastic reduction in personnel for the health department, which now employs about 82,000 people. Together with previous layoffs, the move will bring the department down to about 62,000, the agency said.

New Name for Restructured Division

The restructuring will include creating a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America, which Kennedy said will go by the acronym AHA. “We’re going to do more with less,” he said, even as he acknowledged it would be “a painful period for HHS.”

The 28 divisions of the health agency will be consolidated into 15 new divisions, according to a statement issued by the department. Kennedy announced the changes in a YouTube video.

Kennedy’s department touches the lives of every American. Through its various agencies — including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health — it regulates drugs, monitors food safety, tracks infectious disease and conducts biomedical research.

All of those agencies have campuses outside of Washington and tend to operate under their own authority, and Kennedy has been at odds with all of them. Kennedy assailed them, and other parts of the department, in his video.

“When I arrived, I found that over half of our employees don’t even come to work,” he claimed. “HHS has more than 100 communications offices and more than 40 IT departments and dozens of procurement offices and nine HR departments. In many cases, they don’t even talk to each other. They’re mainly operating in the silos.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Sheryl Gay Stolberg/Eric Lee
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