HHS will be Lean and Mean
RFK Jr. guts health agencies
Recently confirmed Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is reportedly laying off nearly half of the public health workforce.
RFKjr is rooting out the deep state of incompetence and business as usual. While some think it will diminish prevention and disease recognition, it can only be improved.
Reducing the workforce in swift action eliminates the old school of bureaucrats operating HHS, CMS, CDC, and FDA.
The inadequacy of the NIH and NIAID were loudly displayed by the actions of Tony Fauci. Fauci is the longest-standing dinosaur, who has worked at NIH for five decades, accumulating the highest salary and pension plan. (making more than any President, or Congressional representative. Fauci is very smart, and easily outmaneuvered fellow bureaucrats.
Along with firings at the National Institutes of Health, Politico estimates that RFK Jr., DOGE Chair Elon Musk, and President Donald Trump have targeted at least 3,600 federal health workers in a downsizing effort of administrative infrastructure. Most of these initial HHS firings are of workers with the CDC and NIH.
Towing the Deep State’s rebuttals, "This is tragic," one CDC employee told NPR. "If we lose these people, we lose important capacity and we lose our CDC future."
"The country is less safe,” former top-ranking CDC official Anne Schuchat told CBS. “These are the deployable assets critical for investigating new threats, from anthrax to Zika.” (what is a deployable asset?)
Here are the Counter thoughts.
“HHS is following the Administration's guidance and taking action to support the President's broader efforts to restructure and streamline the federal government. This is to ensure that HHS better serves the American people at the highest and most efficient standard,” HHS Communications Director Andrew Nixon said in a statement to NPR.
Trump’s team has a solution: “A better, smarter, perimeter.” They offer the following.
On Sunday, Kevin Hassett, Trump’s former chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” that “what we need to do is have better ways with bio-security and medication and so on to make sure that the perimeter doesn't have to kill the chickens. To have a better, smarter, perimeter … they're killing chickens to stop the spread, but chickens don't fly.”
His fix for public health issues seems to be creating a magic “perimeter” while killing all of the wild ducks and geese in the United States. Between that and RFK Jr.’s mass public health layoffs, what could go wrong?
The Newsletter observes. It has already been wrong, time for a change.