I Can't Make It Through RFK Jr.'s Explanation For Cutting 10,000 HHS Jobs Without Screaming
HHS Secretary, heal thyself. Because you're pretty damned sick.
I have been an atheist all my life, but I have never been as certain of the fact that there is no state of “life after death” that could interact with the living on this plane than I am at this very moment, after having watched three minutes and 11 seconds of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. talking out of his ass about healthcare. Because if such a thing did exist, the ghost of his uncle, noted single-payer healthcare advocate Ted Kennedy, would have risen up from the grave and beaten the absolute shit out of him. Or made him explode. Or something. Or if telekinesis existed, I would have been able to do so, somehow.
I’m sorry to report that there is no such magic.
The whole announcement is six minutes long. It’s meant to be a justification for firing 10,000 workers from critical departments like the FDA, the CDC, and the NIH — even as we are currently dealing with a measles outbreak, the threat of bird flu and other nonsense. It’s not a very good one.
But let’s examine it, shall we?
Hey everybody, I’d like to share with you a paradox that I've encountered here in Washington DC as the new secretary of HHS. Our department is filled for the most part with competent, conscientious public servants, and yet the agency has been inefficient as a whole.
How? He does not say.
Over the past four years, during the Biden administration, HHS’s budget increased by 38 percent and its staffing increased by 17 percent.
Yes, because there was a massive Medicaid expansion, which included providing 462,000 people across the nation with postpartum care; because they helped “3 million eligible seniors and people with disabilities enroll in the Extra Help program in 2023 to benefit from the program’s lower cost premiums, deductibles, and copayments”; because they re-enrolled “500,000 children and adults who were improperly disenrolled from Medicaid and CHIP”; and because they “invested $105 million in funding to support more than 100 community-based organizations working to improve maternal and infant health.” Also because there was a fucking pandemic and people needed help and still do.
But all of that money has failed to improve the health of Americans. In fact, the rate of chronic disease and cancer increased dramatically as our department has grown.
Is this because of “bureaucracy” or is it because the largest generation, the Baby Boomers, have gotten older and therefore more prone to these issues? Chronic illnesses are increasing around the world for a variety of reasons, one of which is the fact that people simply live much longer these days.
Our lifespan has dropped, so Americans now live six years shorter than Europeans. We are the sickest nation in the world and we have the highest rate of chronic disease. The US ranks last among 40 developed nations in terms of health, but we spend two to three times more per-capita than those nations.
Gee! Why might this be? What do these other countries have that we do not? Could it be … that everyone has healthcare?
It’s one thing when people on the Right or even centrist-y Democrats claim that we have the best healthcare in the world. That, I’m basically used to, and I’m sure they feel that it’s true, if only because it’s been said over and over enough times that they’ve absorbed it into their bones. They say things like “but what about choice?” or “but what about the long wait times!” and it’s clear that they haven’t actually given it much thought beyond a vision of “socialized healthcare” that I suspect involves eating a lot of borscht and being given a single, lint-covered Ibuprofen in lieu of chemotherapy.
It’s another entirely when someone admits that we pay more and have worse outcomes than the rest of the world and their solution is that less healthcare is more. Because yes, that is where he is going with this.
As secretary, I now understand why all this money is not improving our health. HHS is a sprawling bureaucracy that encompasses literally hundreds of departments, committees, and other offices.
You know how bureaucracies work. Every time a new issue arises, they tack on another committee. This leads to tremendous waste and duplication, and worst of all, a loss of any unified sense of mission. The resulting pandemonium has injured American health and damaged department morale. When I arrived, I found that over half of our employees don’t even come to work.
Oh fuck right off with that. If people can do their jobs from home, let them do their jobs from home.
In one case, defiant bureaucrats impeded the secretary’s office from accessing the closely guarded databases that might reveal the dangers of certain drugs and medical interventions.
It’s not clear what he’s specifically referring to, here, but we do know that DOGE accessed the child support database after “defiant bureaucrats fought against it,” which included sensitive personal income information.
The rest of the video, which I did force myself to watch just now, is just a bunch of nonsense about how, somehow, cutting all of these jobs is going to, somehow, allow the HHS and the agencies that fall under its purview do better. Somehow.
I have some good news though. As part of President Trump's DOGE workforce reduction initiative, we are going to streamline HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective. We are 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 departments and agencies, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America or AHA. We have two goals. The first is obvious: to save the taxpayer money by making our department more efficient. And the second, is to radically improve our quality of service.
I want to promise you now that we are going to do more with less.
This is all nonsense. The whole thing is nonsense and it’s very clear that he has no idea what the hell he is doing.
Ten thousand people are going to lose their jobs today. Ten thousand households are going to be fucked, because the Health and Human Services secretary is an imbecile who doesn’t know what anyone’s job is and therefore assumes they are expendable. This is like me trying to take a car apart and put it back together again while going “Oh, I don’t know what this part does, guess I’ll just throw them away!” and expecting it to run better than ever before. RFK Jr. knows less about running Health and Human Services than I know about fixing a car and I don’t even own a car.
States have already lost billions of dollars in funding this week that had been allocated during COVID and weren’t supposed to expire until 2027. Billions of dollars that were going towards things like handling the measles outbreak, drug addiction, mental health care, and modernizing database systems (extremely necessary should there be another pandemic). This included “$11.4 billion from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as well as around $1 billion from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, known as S.A.M.H.S.A.”
Now, not only is much of the money invested previously in these now half-finished projects being wasted, now not only are they losing this funding for their other health needs, but they are also going to lose workers, offices, and programs that were helping as well.
It’s going to be a fucking shitshow.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Any boss who says "do more with less" is already an asshole.
They didn't even notify us via supervisors/division heads...everyone in HHS found out that the RIF was happening at the same time as the public. Especially enjoyed the part where he says most of us are “competent, conscientious public servants” but then says half of us don’t even show up to work.
I know that the cruelty is the point, but it just still breaks my brain that a subset of the population views civil servants losing their jobs as a good thing. I didn't join the government to make money (in fact, I make four times LESS than my peers who are in the private sector), I joined because it was a chance to give back to this country and my fellow citizens, as well as just being more stable than the private sector. But people are happy about 10k households losing their incomes in order to give billionaires an extra $30k in tax cuts...I just cannot fathom the thought process of cheering for this.