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I became Secretary of Health and Human Services with one overarching goal — to Make America Healthy Again — and that is exactly what I have set out to do in my first two months at the department. Our health-care system is not working for the average American.
Study after study shows that America spends more on health care than any other country in the world by a large margin. At HHS alone, we spend $1.7 trillion annually. This is nearly one-third of our entire federal budget and almost 7% of our country’s gross domestic product.
Despite this extravagant spending, our country’s health is declining. America has the highest rates of chronic disease in the world.
We rank last in terms of health among developed nations. And life expectancy is declining for many groups of Americans.
Spending more money and doing the same things is not going to fix our problem. That is why we are undertaking radical change at HHS.
I inherited an agency with approximately 82,000 employees working across 28 different divisions. Many of these offices contain duplicative and redundant functions, in many cases as the result of pet projects or crises that may have happened 20, 30 or even 40 years ago. We are not focusing on the right problems, and we are not coordinating our resources in an effective way.
The problem has only gotten worse since COVID. Over the past five years, the department’s budget has ballooned, growing by 38% from $1.2 trillion to $1.7 trillion. At the same time, our number of employees has increased 17%.
Unfortunately, this extra spending and staff has not improved our nation’s health as a country. Instead, it has only created more waste, administrative bloat and duplication. But we are changing this.
As soon as I came into office, we offered our employees, especially those who were not aligned with our mission, the chance to resign gracefully. Nearly 10,000 HHS employees voluntarily chose to depart through our Deferred Resignation Program, Voluntary Early Retirement Authority, and Voluntary Separation Incentive programs.
However, we need to do more. In alignment with President Trump’s executive order to decrease the size of the federal workforce, we are undertaking a further reduction in force of approximately 10,000 employees.
This will come in three parts. First, we are streamlining our administrative functions, including our human resources, procurement and information technology offices.
Today, HHS has more than 40 procurement offices and 40 chief information officers, leading to significant duplication and inefficiency. Centralizing these functions across the department will account for approximately 70% of our reduction in force.
Second, we are going to reduce redundant and duplicative program offices across the department. We will announce the reorganization details in June.
Today, multiple offices focus on key priorities like women’s health, minority health and HIV/AIDS. Too often this results in a lack of focus and uncoordinated resources. By eliminating these redundancies, we will both drive better outcomes and more efficiently use resources. This change will not affect our current programs; our remaining staff will be able to pick up the responsibilities of those who depart.
Finally, we are closing five of our highest-cost regional offices in Boston, Chicago, New York City, San Francisco and Seattle. The functions performed by these offices will be transferred to our remaining five regional offices as well as our staff in Washington, DC, so that no service will be lost.
In total, these changes will return us to approximately 90% of our pre-COVID staffing level, while improving efficiency and streamlining operations.
These steps are still not enough, though. Over the coming months, I will be working to restructure the department as a whole, in partnership with Congress and others across the administration.
For example, we will refocus the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on its core mission of outbreak response and preparedness. We’ll also combine multiple offices across HHS into a new Administration for a Healthy America, dedicated to disease prevention and fighting chronic disease.
I did not come to Washington, DC, to be a bureaucrat — I came here to drive change and to team with President Trump to improve and save the lives of countless Americans. That is what drives me every day. And I will do whatever it takes to make it happen.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is the 26th secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services.