US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced plans to reshape federal public health agencies on Thursday, including cutting 10,000 employees and centralising some functions of the FDA, CDC and others under his purview.
The job cuts include 3,500 at the Food and Drug Administration, 2,400 at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and 1,200 at the National Institutes of Health.
The latest job cuts, and about 10,000 recent voluntary departures, will reduce the number of full-time HHS employees to 62,000 from 82,000, the department said.
"Over time, bureaucracies like HHS become wasteful and inefficient even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent civil servants," Kennedy said in a statement.
"This overhaul will be a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves. That's the entire American public, because our goal is to Make America Healthy Again," he added.
President Donald Trump and billionaire ally Elon Musk, who oversees the DOGE cost-cutting initiative, have been gutting agencies as part of an effort to shrink the federal bureaucracy.
Trump ordered all federal agencies earlier this month to draw up plans for a second wave of mass layoffs and the White House began reviewing the plans last week alongside Musk's.
Large government agencies like HHS sprawl over time and there is merit in reorganising them, which has happened under both Democratic and Republican administrations, but this plan goes beyond that, said Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at non-profit KFF.
"This is not just a reorganisation of HHS.
It is also a slashing of the federal workforce, which will ultimately affect government services," said Levitt, a former senior adviser to the White House and HHS under President Bill Clinton.
