By Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Thursday that some of the programs and workers purged in last week’s dramatic restructuring plan to shed 20,000 staffers will be reinstated, saying they were mistakenly cut.
“There were some programs that were cut that are being reinstated,” Kennedy told ABC News. “Personnel that should not have been cut were cut; we’re reinstating them, and that was always the plan.”
The restructuring plan is part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s workforce optimization initiative, led by Elon Musk, President Donald Trump’s billionaire adviser.
Departmental agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and National Institutes of Health are slated to cut 3,500, 2,400, and 1,200 employees, respectively.
Ultimately, the current 82,000 full-time employees will be reduced to 62,000, according to last week’s announcement.
Kennedy said some other programs would be reinstated as well, adding that the aim was to cut redundancies in “administrative sections” by consolidating dozens of IT, HR and communications departments.
“In the course of that, there were a number of instances where studies that should not have been cut were cut and reinstated . . . personnel that should not have been cut were cut, and we’ve reinstated them,” he said.