The promise of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to restore the steep cuts to the World Trade Center Health Program was a worthless lie, betraying the heroes and victims of 9/11. He is a low character, but we didn’t know he would go that low.
There was righteous outrage when New Yorkers discovered the slashing to the WTC Health Program, set up in the aftermath of the horrors inflicted of Sept. 11 to treat injuries, chronic conditions and illnesses suffered by responders and survivors.
RFK said he would restore personnel and capacity, and indeed last week the program began once more accepting applicants. That turned out to be an empty gesture, as last Friday the agency cut staff once more, all but ensuring that participants will continue to be denied the care they’re entitled to.
Sens. Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand were correct in saying that RFK had out-and-out lied in promising to restore the critical program, which now serves 137,000 people.
It should come as no surprise to anyone that RFK is a charlatan, a liar and a fabulist, as open as he’s been about his own many mistakes and personal failings. This is a man who has adopted as a career trajectory embracing some of the most noxious lies imaginable, those that cast doubt on the efficacy and safety of perhaps our greatest-ever medical achievement, vaccinations.
One has to wonder at this point of Kennedy is setting out to do something of an inverse of the Hippocratic Oath (which he of course never took, seeing as he is neither a doctor nor a public health professional of any kind): as opposed to doing no harm, he wants to do as much harm as possible by stripping down the functions of his life-saving department.
Yet again, we must point out that there is nothing particularly efficient nor managerially sound about this debacle. We understand that the argument from the beginning has been that the administration and its various zealots and true believers are taking a hacksaw to government waste, but no one really needs to take that argument seriously. It was dubious from the get-go and everything they’ve done so far has made clear the real goal is to collapse the administrative state almost in its entirety, no matter the human and social costs (excluding, of course, immigration enforcement and detention, which can hoover as much money as they’d like).
Ailing 9/11 responders and survivors don’t have the time for the administration to be goaded and bullied into providing the care and services that were promised. They need the care now and they need it to be uninterrupted. Respiratory illnesses and cancers aren’t really the sorts of things where it’s wise to be stopping and starting treatments dependent on the amount of public and official pressure that political appointees receive.
It’s great that the department has resumed enrollments, but that’s useless without the staff to actually run the program and approve treatments. It may surprise RFK and the DOGE people to learn this, but you cannot actually run a government program with no personnel; ChatGPT simply isn’t going to cut it for this one. We owe it to the thousands of people who, decades later, are feeling the impact of that dark day.
