Michael F. Cannon
Michael F. Cannon
Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has announced and begun implementing the elimination of 10,000 positions at the Department of Health and Human Services. He is also reorganizing the department. He estimates savings of $1.8 billion per year. A further 10,000 HHS employees have taken buyout offers or retired early since President Trump resumed office. Altogether, these moves will reduce HHS staffing levels by some 24 percent.
To the extent Congress authorizes the secretary to do so, reducing HHS staffing levels is the right thing to do. Congress should go further by eliminating the regulations and spending programs those HHS employees implemented. Doing so would prevent the risk that cutting some HHS jobs could paradoxically increase the size of government.
Many HHS Employees Deserve to Lose Their Jobs
Let’s be honest. Many HHS employees deserve to lose their jobs. To take just one example, when COVID-19 came to the United States, HHS employees crippled the public health response.
While other nations were removing regulatory barriers to COVID-19 diagnostic tests, Food and Drug Administration officials increased regulatory barriers to those tests. Scientists called the FDA’s actions “insane.” Private companies and government labs developed dozens of effective tests. FDA officials blocked them all. They did not loosen their grip until President Trump ordered them to stop blocking tests and to let states approve tests themselves.
It gets worse. For many months, the only test the FDA approved was the one that the Centers for Disease Control developed. Yet the CDC (also part of HHS) contaminated its tests with the COVID-19 virus, rendering them “useless.” An FDA inspector warned CDC employees that if the CDC were a private company, he would “shut you down.” Spoiler alert: the FDA did not shut the lab down.
A federal court has just ruled that Congress never even gave the FDA authority to regulate the laboratory-developed tests it banned during COVID-19. » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/downsizing-hhs-congress-should-go-even-further