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(NewsNation) — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. claims that Americans got sicker nether the Biden administration, contempt the national bureau increasing by 38% during Biden's 4 years successful office.
Now that the bureau has slashed 20,000 jobs since President Donald Trump took bureau successful January, Kennedy said it volition bash a much effectual occupation of tackling chronic unwellness successful America, contempt being smaller. HHS officials announced successful March that the bureau had gone from 82,000 full-time employees to 62,000 and that 28 divisions wrong the bureau would beryllium consolidated into 15.
The restructuring would prevention $1.8 billion, the bureau announced.
“It’s not throwing wealth astatine it oregon hiring radical that is solving the problem,” Kennedy told NewsNation connected Wednesday, adding. “What we’re doing is streamlining the agency, and we’re recalibrating the trajectory truthful that radical determination are narrowly focused connected 1 issue, which is however bash we lick the chronic unwellness epidemic?”
Kennedy said that erstwhile his uncle, John F. Kennedy, served arsenic president, lone 3% of Americans suffered from chronic illness. He said today, 60% of Americans woody with those types of maladies. Kennedy said the state is spending astir $1.6 trillion per year, of 95% of the agency’s budget, connected dealing with chronic disease.
Because of those diseases, Kennedy said, 74% of American children cannot suffice to service successful the U.S. military, which is putting a bigger spotlight connected the contented his bureau is trying to solve.
“So this is an existential menace to our nationalist security, it’s an existential menace to our system and we person to narrowly absorption connected that,” Kennedy said, “and that’s what the caller HHS is doing.”
