Amid The Measles Outbreak, HHS Cuts 1/8th Of Workforce
from the perfect-timing dept
The measles outbreak that began in Texas continues at a brisk pace. RFK Jr. and his Department of Health and Human Services, as we’ve discussed, continues to make the outbreak worse through a combination of public opining on alternative treatments that are making some even sicker, garbled messaging that seeks to downplay the severity of the outbreak, and the Secretary’s inability to simply tell people to get the MMR vaccine so we can be done with all of this. There have been 22 new cases in Texas in the last five days alone, a number that is almost certainly underreported. Health experts are getting worried, particularly as the measles has an unhappy side effect of causing immune amnesia, which can severely disrupt a person’s immunity from infection via prior infection or vaccine for a wide variety of other diseases. A sort of gateway virus that can then expose the victim to many other diseases they should be protected against.
Honestly, if anyone would be keen on preventing an epidemic or pandemic in 2025, you would think it would be Donald Trump, given how the COVID-19 pandemic played a heavy role in his losing his reelection bid in 2020.
So what is HHS under RFK Jr. doing while all of that is going on? Slashing 1/8th of HHS’ workforce, of course. And, as is typical for him and the department under his leadership, he’s dribbling the communications around those cuts down his leg, as well.
Kennedy’s silence is prompting questions from Republican and Democratic lawmakers alike, with a bipartisan request for President Donald Trump’s health secretary to appear before a Senate committee next week to explain the cuts.
As many as 10,000 notices were sent to scientists, senior leaders, doctors, inspectors and others across the department in an effort to cut a quarter of its workforce. The agency itself has offered no specifics on which jobs have been eliminated, with the information instead coming largely from employees who have been dismissed.
RFK Jr. has said he would come before Congress quarterly to answer their questions. The bipartisan request to appear in a congressional hearing call that out. And, yet, RFK Jr. has not agreed to appear at the time of this writing. There is already reporting that the White House is furious with Kennedy and the department, particularly as the White House has had to invest more time in communications for the department than any other in the Executive Branch.
Since the measles debacle, the White House communications team has handled more press relations on behalf of HHS than any other department, and often has acted as a contact between reporters and the agency.
“This shouldn’t be the White House’s job, but here we are,” a White House adviser said.
These cuts, part of an effort to shave roughly 0.1% of the HHS budget, will have an impact on public health. And not just on the current measles outbreak, but on all kinds of things.
In every corner of the FDA, and at sister health agencies including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health, thousands of workers, specialists, and scientists were slapped with Department of Government Efficiency pink slips Tuesday morning.
A top scientist on the FDA’s bird flu response team – gone.
The leader of Makary’s tobacco unit – gone.
To borrow part of a phrase, slashing employees that power American healthcare at the tail end of a pandemic and perhaps at the starting line of a new epidemic is exactly the wrong thing to do… but, here we are. A vaccine skeptic with all kinds of crackpot health theories has been put in charge of American healthcare because he said nice things about Donald Trump. If measles does indeed become an epidemic, or worse, any blood from it will be squarely on the hands of Kennedy and Trump.
Frightening though it may be to think it, one move to watch out for is the administration ceasing to report the number of infections from measles, the bird flu, or any other disease that might rear in the near future. Either a purposeful refusal to report those numbers or, more likely, a byproduct of staff reductions could result in all of us being far less informed, and far less safe, than we are today.
Filed Under: donald trump, health and human services, hhs, measles, pandemic, rfk jr.
Comments on “Amid The Measles Outbreak, HHS Cuts 1/8th Of Workforce”
The goal of Republicans is the same as many other America-hating terrorist cults: the murder and torture of as many innocent Americans as possible.
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You’re probably trying to troll all the orange clown worshipers that come here, but you’ve come really close to hitting the nail on the head.
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This is all good and well
But what about the rest of the world? You are spreading your diseases to low income countries who can’t afford the measles vaccine. Don’t we count as human beings?
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CCP are illegitimate occupiers of the West Taiwan mainland.
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🥱
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Have you seriously not been paying attention? Even Americans who merely look foreign no longer count as human beings. And vaccination funding for poor countries was one of Trump’s first cuts.
Your best bet now might be to ask Bill Gates. Seriously; the Gates Foundation funds vaccinations for countries in need—and, by the time Trump leaves office, the U.S.A. might be one of those, and we might see African countries advising their citizens to get some extra vaccinations before traveling there.
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I was not aware that HHS held dominion over the healthcare of other nations. I recognize that every time you comment, you’re trying to make a plea for every country other than America, but this post and those before it are about the American HHS secretary.
What exactly are you looking for?
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Something they can take back to their propaganda mill bosses and say, “Look how much division I sowed! Can I go to the bathroom now?”
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The Russian trolls scrolling for opportunities: “Wait, you guys get to go to the bathroom?!?”
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“This is all good and well”? Really?
As far as I can tell, that’s the administration’s only concern. They don’t seem to care how the department is run, as long as they don’t have to deal with it.
Matt and Koby voted for this.
Honestly, if anyone would be keen on preventing an epidemic or pandemic in 2025, you would think it would be Donald Trump, given how the COVID-19 pandemic played a heavy role in his losing his reelection bid in 2020.
I don’t think so. He’s not planning on having any future elections, so how the public would vote in those is of no concern. An executive order declaring a state of emergency (preceded by actions designs to precipitate a state of emergency) will suspend elections indefinitely, and a feckless Congress, eviscerated court system, and defanged legal profession will do nothing about this.
Just give them Hydroxychloroquine and bleach enemas! That will cure measles. I think the Trump administration is hiding the truth about this treatment!!!
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Nah, dude, the new hotness is lots of Vitamin A and prayers. I hear they call it “The Real American Cure”, brother.
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This is why we need Canada and Greenland. For access to polar bears.
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The Measles isn’t killing enough kids, let’s give them liver failure!
Brain Death
The Rich who catapulted the current imbecile (and his clown car of incompetence) into office somehow thought the total dismantling of these institutions would somehow end up well for them?
It is pretty hard to go out to eat at your favorite (and exclusive) fine dining establishment when the staff has a highly contagious disease, and/or health inspections no longer occur in the kitchens.
No matter how much money you have, your towncar getting into a wreck due to (uninspected, uncorrected) shoddy workmanship won’t guarantee you’ll be able to sue them later if you die in the crash.
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The restaurant might have to close for a few days, but they’re not required to pay sick leave under federal law or in most states, so their expenses will decrease too. The rich will find some other exclusive restaurant during the mean time. If prices do have to go up a bit, that only makes them more exclusive.
The rich, of course, can and mostly do get vaccinated, and can afford medical care. Things may not end up optimally for them, but they’ll probably be “well” enough. Unless they lose money; I imagine the 10% stock market drop over the last couple of days will have them losing more sleep than a slightly increased measles or car-crash risk.
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He has a different solution. He’s not going to prevent measles outbreaks, he’s going to prevent elections.
If you want a single quote to illustrate how much of a charlie foxtrot this is, consider this remark from RFK Jr. in The Guardian.
WTF?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/04/rfk-jr-doge-cuts
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Measure once and cut twice. What Musk calls “efficiency.”
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“We have to cut most of our workforce to save money, but we’ll have to hire some of you back because we’re too fucking stupid to actually make cuts to our budget that are based on things like ‘facts’ and ‘planning’ and ‘thinking about future public health nightmares’.”
Literally the dumbest motherfuckers in charge of every lever of power in the federal government, led by the dumbest man to ever be elected president and a similarly stupid unelected “special employee” who is both a co-president in all but name and a campaign official who thinks bribing voters is a good idea.
Re: Re: 'Come back and work under THEM? No thank you.'
‘Fire almost everyone and then hire some of them back if it turns out they were needed after all’ is even dumber than it might seem at first glance(and that is a very high bar already) because good luck convincing anyone but the absolutely desperate to come back after they’ve been canned in a mass-purge, given they’ll have just been shown exactly the sort of person they’ll be working for for the foreseeable future.
Well, how else is RFK Jr. gonna hold a nationwide measles party?
'Working as intended'
Who ever could have foreseen that putting an anti-vaxxer nutbag in charge of responding to health crises on the national level would result in denigrating the actual science in favor of quack ‘cures’?
If you put a pyromaniac arsonist in charge of the fire department don’t be surprised when houses start burning down a lot more frequently.
RFK Jr. has said he would come before Congress quarterly to answer their questions. The bipartisan request to appear in a congressional hearing call that out. And, yet, RFK Jr. has not agreed to appear at the time of this writing.
If only there was some way for congress to force people to show up, some way for them to respond to the contempt shown by people refusing their ‘invitation’ to talk…
Guess they handed over that authority to the dictator as well, after all it wouldn’t do for congress to give the impression that they have any power or authority over the current regime after all, can’t upset the boss.
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Anti-vaxxers. 🙃
Natural selection getting rid of the willfully stupid is cause for celebration.
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As has been said before: If they were the only people being affected by this, that wouldn’t really be a problem—but they’re not, so it is.
I see your measles and raise you TB and gonorrhea.
a popular myth
It is said that the ostrich buries its head in the sand in order to hide from and thus evade danger. The reality, that it is actually searching for appropriately sized rocks for its gizzard, is somewhat more prosaic and less amusting.