Washington (AP) – Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did not make any modern details on his massive restructuring of the US Ministry of Health on Wednesday and the day after thousands of layoffs, which bounced through his agencies and in some cases hollowed out entire offices all over the country.
Kennedy’s silence asks questions from republican and democratic legislators equally on questions, whereby a cross -party application for health secretary of President Donald Trump will appear before a Senate committee next week to explain the cuts.
Up to 10,000 messages were sent to scientists, managers, doctors, inspectors and others in the entire department to reduce a quarter of his workforce. The agency itself has not offered any details about which jobs have been removed, whereby the information is largely coming from employees who have been rejected.
“This overhaul is about re -organizing HHS with its core mission: stopping the epidemic of chronic diseases and making America well again,” said Kennedy in his only comments on the previous layoffs. “It is a win-win situation for taxpayers and for every American we serve.”
The move, the department said, is expected to be $ 1.8 billion from the agency’s annual budget of $ 1.7 trillion $ 1%.
The department has not published any final figures, but last week 3,500 jobs from the Food and Drug Administration, 2,400 jobs in the centers for the control and prevention of illnesses and 1,200 of the National Institutes of Health. Experts in public health and top democrats have triggered alarms, such as the deep cuts – about 25% of the department – influence the safety of food and prescription drugs, medical research and the prevention of infectious diseases.
It is still unclear why certain jobs have been removed and others were spared.
When the cuts were in action on Tuesday, Senator Bill Cassidy, Senator of Senator of Vermont, and Vermont, Bernie Sanders, an independent person who crouches with Democrats, sent him a letter to Kennedy, who called him before the Senate Health Committee. In a statement, Cassidy said that Kennedy’s appearance was part of his promise to appear in front of the committee quarterly.
“This will be a good opportunity for him to clarify the record and to speak to the goals, the structure and advantages of the proposed reorganization,” said Cassidy’s explanation.
The Rep. Diana Harshbarger, a Republican from Tennessee, said that the house’s health subcommittee also had questions about job cuts.
“We will find out what the layoffs were – 10,000 – we didn’t know,” said Harshbarger on Wednesday in a health forum organized by Politico. “We will find out what the premise was for these layoffs.”
At the same event, Calley, Calley Calley, a close consultant of Kennedy who works in the White House, defended the cuts. However, he fought to give an explanation of how the overhaul will improve the health of the Americans. Some of his claims were hit with screams and hisses.
“The system is really on the wrong track,” it says, and later added that it would like to see more research from the NIH.
Politicos Dasha Burns means how the NIH would carry out more research with fewer employees of the agency who had released more than 1,000 NIH scientists and other employees before the layoffs this week. The Republican administration of Trump has thrown hundreds of NIH subsidies and delayed hundreds of millions of dollars -as on the HHS own website -with continued or modern research funds, including for cancer studies and the Alzheimer centers across the country.
Responsible means to be asked: “Was NIH financing lowered?”
He continued that the Trump government will put more money directly into the hands of scientists to limit the “indirect costs” of research grants with 15%, although scientists have argued at hospitals and universities that the cap has reduced money, which is of crucial importance for the implementation of studies.
___
This story was corrected to show that the savings are about 1%and not 1%a tenth of 1%.
___
Lauran Nergaard in Washington contributed with Associated Press.
