PRINCETON—The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services today fired as many as 10,000 workers across its agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), and National Institutes of Health (NIH). Dr. Richard Besser, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, released the following statement in response.
HHS has a mission to improve and protect Americans’ health and wellbeing. Its leadership should be working nonstop to ensure health is no longer a privilege but a right. Instead, they are systematically and cruelly dismantling our nation’s public health system and workforce, which threatens the health and wellbeing of everyone in America.
This is not a so-called restructuring. These are reckless, thoughtless cuts that will only make American communities less healthy and less safe. They represent an abdication of the department’s essential responsibility to promote and protect health. And they present a fundamentally different vision of what government can and should do to improve people’s lives. Americans deserve better.
Our governmental institutions can always do better and must always look to make sure resources are well spent. However, these cuts are not about increasing efficiency. These indiscriminate firings of our nation’s health officials are a recipe for disaster that will especially harm those who already face the greatest barriers to health: Lower-income working families that are disproportionately uninsured. Rural communities, where hospitals and health centers are few and far between. Older adults and disabled people, who may need greater care and experience higher risks of illness.
I am confident that the remaining staff at federal health agencies will perform their jobs as best they can. They know what it means to be a public servant. But the services people depend on—services that aim to prevent gun violence and reduce smoking, or help families have healthy babies—will be significantly impaired as result of these cuts.
It is clear that political leaders in this administration are neither committed to nor serious about improving everyday people’s lives and health.
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