Since getting confirmed as Trump’s Health and Human Services Secretary in February, Robert F. Kennedy has proposed over $11 billion in cuts to his department. Last week, he terminated thousands of employees and entire agencies, including ones in charge of crucial research and services surrounding reproductive care and intimate partner violence. Now, in his first sit-down interview since becoming health secretary, Kennedy conceded to CBS News that he’s “not familiar” with the specifics of what’s been cut or why.
It’s tempting to hear this and ask, “OK, so who’s really in charge then???” but I’d wager that whoever’s “really in charge,” be that Kennedy or someone else, also wouldn’t be able to tell you what was cut and why. This entire administration has made clear it operates on a slash-and-burn, ask-questions-later strategy that may or may not be using an AI system to decide which career civil servants and public health experts get to keep their jobs and which get fired.
“You proposed more than $11 billion to local and state programs addressing things like infectious disease, mental health, addiction, and childhood vaccination. Did you personally approve those cuts?” Dr. Jon LaPook, CBS News’ chief medical correspondent, asks Kennedy in a clip from the interview posted Wednesday afternoon. “No, I’m not familiar with those cuts. We’d have to go—” Kennedy responds, before LaPook interjects to say “there’s, like, 50 pages of cuts.” To this, Kennedy says, “The cuts were mainly DEI cuts, which the president ordered.” When LaPook then provides a specific example, asking Kennedy if he knew about the $750,000 “University of Michigan grant into adolescent diabetes” that was cut, Kennedy says he “didn’t know that,” and “that’s something that we’ll look at.”
He continues, “I just, I’m not familiar with that particular study. But there’s a number of studies that were cut that came to our attention and that did not deserve to be cut, and we reinstated them. Our purpose is not to reduce any level of scientific research that’s important.” Of course, conceding mistakes isn’t exactly admirable or helpful when these are both easily avoidable and incredibly damaging mistakes—mistakes that can throw the entire public health system into chaos, with life-threatening consequences, lasting long after that mistake has been “corrected.” In the same interview, Kennedy further justifies the sweeping cuts, citing directives from Elon Musk’s DOGE, talks about his opposition to life-saving vaccine mandates, and more.
Of course, if Kennedy can’t speak to any of the chaos and harm he’s so mindlessly inflicted, I’m happy to sub in for him. Last week, over 7,000 workers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services received termination letters. Many were career civil servants and researchers with decades of experience in their fields, whose roles were helping to stave off another pandemic. HHS entirely shuttered several key agencies within the CDC, including the intimate partner violence prevention team on the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention; the team researching infertility and assisted reproductive technology (ART); and the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS), which performs the lifesaving work of studying race and class disparities in maternal mortality. PRAMS employees were reportedly told that their research into the systemic barriers that have rendered Black people three to four times more likely to die of pregnancy-related causes than white people ran afoul of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
Around the same time last week, HHS froze tens of millions of dollars in Title X grants to over a dozen family planning providers—alleging that these providers also violated the anti-DEI executive order. Some of the providers were told their past statements condemning systemic racism after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020 were the issue, while HHS told several Planned Parenthood state affiliates that their statements in support of diversity and their service to undocumented patients violated Trump’s executive orders. In response, Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, warned that “people across the country [will] suffer, cancers go undetected, access to birth control is severely reduced, and the nation’s STI crisis worsens,” due to these funding cuts—and she also aptly accused the Trump administration of “not giving a second thought to the devastation they will cause.” That certainly seems true of Kennedy, who can’t even identify what he’s cutting.
Some of the Title X providers whose grants were frozen said the targeting almost felt random, that the process seemed entirely haphazard. Last month, one researcher learned that her program, which aimed to address a lack of research into the role of domestic violence in rising maternal mortality, had lost its $400,000 HHS grant. She told Mother Jones she suspects the Trump administration simply used AI to identify and target any programs that include terms like “equity”—her project was titled “Restoring equity to measuring and preventing perinatal intimate partner violence”—without actually reviewing what they were cutting.
Since being confirmed to run the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) last week, Dr. Oz has been excitedly pledging to heavily wield AI. That sounds horrifying—all the more so when, clearly, no one at HHS seems to know what’s going on, potentially because major decisions about who and what gets funded are not even being made by humans.
Kennedy claimed last month that the gutting of HHS employees is meant to “[reduce] bureaucratic sprawl” and “[realign] the organization [HHS] with its core mission and our new priorities.” But there don’t seem to be any “core mission” or “priorities”—just blowing up everything they can and citing “DEI” when confronted.
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