The Trump administration plans to cut about 10,000 full-time employees from the Department of Health and Human Services, the department announced Thursday, cutting around a tenth of the staff at the nation’s federal health agencies.
“When combined with HHS’ other efforts, including early retirement and Fork in the Road, the restructuring results in a total downsizing from 82,000 to 62,000 full-time employees,” the department said in a release, estimating that taxpayers would save $1.8 billion from the changes.
A fact sheet shared among senior health officials says that “no additional cuts are currently planned” beyond those announced Thursday and in recent weeks.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy will cut 3,500 jobs from the Food and Drug Administration and 2,400 from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the fact sheet.
“This reduction will not affect drug, medical device, or food reviewers, nor will it impact inspectors,” the fact sheet says of the FDA changes.
From the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the workforce will decline by “approximately 300 employees, with a focus on reducing minor duplication” at CMS. The reorganization will not impact Medicare or Medicaid services, it says.
No CDC infectious diseases personnel are getting cut, one U.S. official said.
The administration is also cutting 1,200 jobs from the National Institutes of Health and 300 from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“The entire federal workforce is downsizing now. So this will be a painful period for HHS,” Kennedy said in video annoncement shared Thursday by the department.
The Wall Street Journal first reported the news.
Alex Wong / / Getty Images 
Health officials had been bracing for steep cuts to be announced this week, as part of the sweeping reorganization architected with the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency cost-cutting task force.
Several health agency officials said they had seen stepped up security measures coming into work this morning. Managers have largely been in the dark about the changes, officials have said, aside from a handful of changes already announced within the department.
Kennedy said earlier this week at the White House that the DOGE team headed by billionaire Elon Musk had “identified extraordinary waste in my department and HHS.” He cited what they considered duplicated work for communications, procurement, IT and HR departments across 40 operating divisions in HHS.
“We are with Elon’s help eliminating the redundancies.” Kennedy said Monday.
One of Kennedy’s biggest proposed changes is to create a new grouping of agencies called the Administration for a Healthy America, which he says will save money and “radically improve our quality of service.”
“We’re going to imbue the agency with a clear sense of mission to radically improve the health of Americans and to improve agency morale. We’re going to eliminate an entire alphabet soup of department sand agencies while preserving their core functions,” Kennedy said in the Thursday video.
The new administration will consolidate work from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health, Health Resources and Services Administration, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, Agency for Toxc Substances and Disease Registry and National Institute for Occupational Safety and Healthy “into a new, unified entity,” the department said.
The Administration for Strategic Preparedness and Response, which was elevated into a separate agency under the Biden administration to oversee tasks like the pandemic stockpile, will be abosrbed into the CDC.
Work from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, which had been bracing for as much as 90% of their staff to be cut by DOGE, will be merged with another agency to create the Office of Strategy.
And the functions from the Administration for Community Living targeted at older adults and people with disabilities will be moved to other agencies, the department said, including the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
“The entire federal workforce is downsizing now. So this will be a painful period for HHS,” Kennedy acknowledged in his remarks.
Details of who exactly will be cut from the department within the agencies remain unclear, under the new reorganization plans. As of Thursday morning, multiple federal health officials said they had received little guidance from the department, aside from Kennedy’s announcement.
In his remarks in the video, Kennedy said that they were “focused on paring away excess administrators while increasing the number of scientists and frontline health providers” in the changes.
“We’re going to streamline our agency and eliminate redundancies and invite everyone to align behind a simple, bold mission: I want every HHS employee to wake up every morning asking themselves, ‘what can I do to restore American health today,'” he added.
