On Thursday, HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. announced that the Trump Administration would be downsizing the Department of Health and Human Services as part of a 'streamline' the agency.
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript
Stay Connected
Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes
More From Forbes: http://forbes.com
Fuel your success with Forbes. Gain unlimited access to premium journalism, including breaking news, groundbreaking in-depth reported stories, daily digests and more. Plus, members get a front-row seat at members-only events with leading thinkers and doers, access to premium video that can help you get ahead, an ad-light experience, early access to select products including NFT drops and more:
https://account.forbes.com/membership/?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=display&utm_campaign=growth_non-sub_paid_subscribe_ytdescript
Stay Connected
Forbes on Facebook: http://fb.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/forbes
Forbes Video on Instagram: http://instagram.com/forbes
More From Forbes: http://forbes.com
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00Hey, everybody, I'd like to share with you a paradox that I've encountered here in Washington,
00:06D.C. as the new secretary of HHS.
00:09Our department is filled for the most part with competent, conscientious public servants,
00:14and yet the agency has been inefficient as a whole.
00:18Over the past four years during the Biden administration, HHS's budget increased by
00:2338 percent and its staffing increased by 17 percent, but all that money has failed
00:29to improve the health of Americans.
00:32In fact, the rate of chronic disease and cancer increased dramatically as our department has
00:38grown.
00:39Our lifespan has dropped, so Americans now live six years shorter than Europeans.
00:44We are the sickest nation in the world, and we have the highest rate of chronic disease.
00:50The U.S. ranks last among 40 developed nations in terms of health, but we spend two to three
00:55times more per capita than those nations.
00:58As secretary, I now understand why all this money is not improving our health.
01:03HHS is a sprawling bureaucracy that encompasses literally hundreds of departments, committees,
01:10and other offices.
01:12You know how bureaucracies work.
01:14Every time a new issue arises, they tack on another committee.
01:18This leads to tremendous waste and duplication, and worst of all, a loss of any unified sense
01:23of mission.
01:24The resulting pandemonium has injured American health and damaged department morale.
01:31When I arrived, I found that over half of our employees don't even come to work.
01:35HHS has more than 100 communications offices and more than 40 IT departments and dozens
01:41of procurement offices and nine HR departments.
01:45In many cases, they don't even talk to each other.
01:48They're mainly operating in silos.
01:50Sometimes these sub-agencies work at cross-purposes with each other.
01:55Some of these little fiefdoms, for example, are so insulated and territorial that they
01:59actually hoard our patient medical data and sell it for profit to each other.
02:06Instead of remedying the chronic disease crisis, perverse incentives have administrators checking
02:10boxes and creating their own homework while public health declines.
02:15A few isolated divisions are neglecting public health altogether and seem only accountable
02:20to the industries that they're supposed to be regulating.
02:24In one case, defiant bureaucrats imputed the secretary's office from accessing the closely
02:30guarded databases that might reveal the dangers of certain drugs and medical interventions.
02:35I have some good news, though.
02:37As part of President Trump's Doge workforce reduction initiative, we're going to streamline
02:42HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective.
02:47We're going to imbue the agency with a clear sense of mission to radically improve the
02:51health of Americans and to improve agency morale.
02:56We're going to eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments and agencies while preserving
03:01their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration
03:07for a Healthy America, or AHA.
03:09We have two goals.
03:10The first is obvious, to save the taxpayer money by making our department more efficient.
03:15And the second is to radically improve our quality of service.
03:19I want to promise you now that we're going to do more with less.
03:24No American is going to be left behind.
03:27Our key services delivered through Medicare and Medicaid, the FDA and CDC, and other agencies
03:34will enter a new era of responsiveness and a new era of effectiveness.
03:39We're going to consolidate all of these departments and make them accountable to you, the American
03:44taxpayer and the American patient.
03:47These goals will honor the aspirations of the vast majority of existing HHS employees
03:52who actually yearn to make America healthy.
03:55Twenty-eight great divisions will become 15.
03:59The entire federal workforce is downsizing now, so this will be a painful period for
04:04HHS as we downsize from 82,000 full-time employees to around 62,000.
04:13We're keenly focused on paring away excess administrators while increasing the number
04:18of scientists and frontline health providers so that we can do a better job for the American
04:23people.
04:24We're going to streamline our agency and eliminate the redundancies and invite everyone to align
04:29behind a simple, bold mission.
04:32I want every HHS employee to wake up every morning asking themselves, what can I do to
04:38restore American health today?
04:41I want to empower everyone in the HHS family to have a sense of purpose and pride and a
04:47sense of personal agency and responsibility to this larger goal.
04:51We're going to save taxpayers nearly $2 billion a year, and we're going to return HHS to its
04:57original commitment to public health and gold standard science.
05:01I want this agency to be once again a revered scientific institution that once made HHS
05:08the envy of the world.
05:10I want everyone who works here to be proud of this agency, to be proud of their work,
05:14to feel a renewed inspiration and their own sense of responsibility for our success in
05:20restoring America to good health.
05:23Streamlining HHS is part of a shift to new priorities, especially ending the chronic
05:28disease epidemic with clean water, safe food, effective medicine, good science, radical
05:35transparency, and a healthy environment.
05:38I think most Americans would agree with me that throwing more money at health care isn't
05:42going to solve the problem, or it would have solved it already.
05:46Obviously, what we've been doing hasn't worked.
05:49That's why we're making this dramatic overhaul, but the real overhaul is even bigger.
05:54The real overhaul is improving the health of the entire nation to make America healthy
05:59again.