Quack Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has a strange way to Make America Healthy Again by taking a blowtorch to the department, cutting some 20,000 full-time jobs across multiple agencies and firing thousands of probationary employees. Out are longtime agency leaders like the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine and tobacco products regulators and staff in charge of doing things like evaluating new drugs on the market.
When traveling abroad, Americans often ask themselves questions like “is the water safe to drink?” and “should I get any vaccines for diseases not found here?” With RFK’s slashing, these are the sorts of questions we’re going to have to begin asking here, as the authorities charged with monitoring all manner of diseases, fomenting the development and rollout of drugs and much else are shown the door in favor of whatever crazed therapies the Kennedy scion has come across in his conspiracist forums.
Diseases like measles are real, as are the vaccines to prevent them, but Bobby thinks that vaccines cause autism, which they don’t. That should have disqualified him, but he was confirmed. So now we have a secretary who claims that vitamin A and cod liver oil can cure measles. And guess what, hospitals are seeing cases of vitamin A toxicity — of kids poisoned by being fed too many vitamins instead of being vaccinated.
It is the new secretary’s prerogative to try to streamline the department’s functions and tinker with the headcount. That’s not what’s happening here; these are heavy-handed slashings by a man who fundamentally does not understand or respect the functions of the agencies under his stewardship.
That’s demonstrated especially by the callousness of the reductions themselves, as thousands of government workers lined up outside their workplaces without knowing whether they still had jobs or not. Many learned the depressing answer only when trying to scan badges and getting rejected by security, which treated them more or less like trespassers.
Beyond the broad public health functions, the cuts have savaged particularized teams like at the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program — which provides assistance for lower-income households to pay heating and cooling bills — and the Administration for Children and Families — which provide support with child development and welfare.
Who is served by this? Certainly not Donald Trump’s own voters, who will be targeted alongside everyone else. They wanted lower grocery bills — which itself now seems like a fantasy as Trump moves to crash the global economy with ill-advised tariffs — and instead they’re going to get thrown to the wolves. As much as RFK has railed against the corrosive influence of Big Pharma, we can tell you that, while they’ll be upset about government-sponsored research drying up, they’ll be all for a diminished regulatory environment so they can peddle drugs with less oversight.
The nation’s public health authorities have rarely been very visible, which leads a chunk of the public to assume that they don’t do much, but millions of people are about to learn just how much their lives were improved by the thousands of diligent scientists, program officers, administrative staff and others working behind the scenes to offer critical services and safeguard public health. The loss cannot be easily reversed as these career pathways shut down and institutional knowledge leaves the agencies. A lot of people are going to suffer.
