Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Announces Major Restructuring to US Health and Human Services

HHS plans to cut a quarter of its workforce down to 62,000 employees.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (R) with Education Secretary Linda McMahon (L) in Washington on Feb. 26, 2025. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has announced major plans to restructure the agency and lay off a quarter of its workforce.

In a video statement on March 27, Kennedy announced “a new era of responsiveness and a new era of effectiveness” that would involve cutting its workforce down to 62,000 employees, ultimately saving taxpayers $1.8 billion (£1.38 billion) a year.

Health and Human Services (HHS) is the United States’ principal agency for overseeing the nation’s health, similar to the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care. It is comprised of 28 agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration.

HHS will reduce its regional offices from 10 to five, and shape its 28 agencies into 15, including a new administration called the Administration for Healthy America.

It comes as part of President Donald Trump’s order, alongside the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), to optimise the government workforce by reducing federal bureaucracy and eliminating waste.

Reestablishing the department was also a part of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) vision, which he ran as a campaign slogan when he endorsed Trump, laying out his mission of saving Americans from a debilitating chronic disease epidemic.

From 2020 to 2025, the HHS budget increased by 38 percent, and its staff increased by 17 percent. Yet the rate of chronic disease and cancer has risen, according to the HHS.

Kennedy described Americans as living six years shorter than Europeans, calling the United States the sickest nation in the world and the highest in chronic disease.

“The U.S. ranks last among 40 developed nations in terms of health, but we spend two to three times more per capita than those nations,” he said.

A report released by the Commonwealth Fund in September 2024, comparing the health of 10 wealthy countries, ranked the United States as dramatically behind everyone else, citing it as being “in a class by itself in the underperformance of its health care sector.”

The Commonwealth Fund also cited the United States as the country spending the largest percentage of its GDP on health care between 1980–2021 by a wide margin.

“But all that money has failed to improve the health of Americans,” Kennedy said.

However, not everyone feels the same way about the restructuring.

Rep. Gerald Connolly (D-Va.), head Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, described the cuts in a statement on social media platform X as “a grave mistake.”

“I have serious concerns about how this will impact Americans’ well-being now and long into the future,” he wrote.

Santosh Nori from the non-profit Healthier Democracy wrote on X, “We should be investing in our public health infrastructure, not dismantling it.”

The American Public Health Association vowed to fight back, with its Executive Director Georges C. Benjamin saying in a statement, “This is a nonsensical rearrangement of the agencies under their charge and an excuse to devastate the workforce for financial reasons.”

The HHS was created as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare under President Dwight Eisenhower in 1953, and adopted its current name in 1980.

Zachary Stieber contributed to this report.