The following is his words explaining the bureaucracy and inefficiency and lack of co-ordination that has ossified the HHS and is not delivering good health to the US population.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on reforms being implemented at HHS and how it aligns with 'Make American Healthy Again:'
Hey everybody, I'd like to share with you a paradox that I've encountered here in Washington, D.C. as the new secretary of HHS. Our department is filled, for the most part, with competent, conscientious public servants, and yet the agency has been inefficient as a whole. Over the past four years during the Biden administration, HHS's budget increased by 38 percent and its staffing increased by 17 percent, but all that money has failed to improve the health of Americans.
In fact, the rate of chronic disease and cancer increased dramatically as our department has grown. Our lifespan has dropped, so Americans now live six years shorter than Europeans. We are the sickest nation in the world and we have the highest rate of chronic disease.
The U.S. ranks last among 40 developed nations in terms of health, but we spend two to three times more per capita than those nations. As secretary, I now understand why all this money is not improving our health. HHS is a sprawling bureaucracy that encompasses literally hundreds of departments, committees, and other offices.
You know how bureaucracies work. Every time a new issue arises, they tack on another committee. This leads to tremendous waste and worse of all, a loss of any unified sense of mission.
The resulting pandemonium has injured American health and damaged department morale. When I arrived, I found that over half of our employees don't even come to work. HHS has more than a hundred communications offices and more than 40 IT departments and dozens of procurement offices and nine HR departments.
In many cases, they don't even talk to each other. They're mainly operating in silos. Sometimes these sub-agencies work at cross purposes with each other.
Some of these little fiefdoms, for example, are so insulated and territorial that they actually hoard our patient medical data and sell it for profit to each other. Instead of remedying the chronic disease crisis, perverse incentives have administrators checking boxes and creating their own homework while public health declines. A few isolated divisions are neglecting public health altogether and seem only accountable to the industries that they're supposed to be regulating.
In one case, defiant bureaucrats impeded the secretary's office from accessing the closely guarded databases that might reveal the dangers of certain drugs and medical interventions. I have some good news, though. As part of President Trump's Doge workforce reduction initiative, we're going to streamline HHS to make our agency more efficient and more effective.
We're going to imbue the agency with a clear sense of mission to radically improve the health of Americans and to improve agency morale. We're going to eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments and agencies while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for a Healthy America, or AHA. We have two goals.
The first is obvious, to save the taxpayer money by making our department more efficient. And the second is to radically improve our quality of service. I want to promise you now that we're going to do more with less.
No American is going to be left behind. Our key services delivered through Medicare and Medicaid, the FDA and CDC, and other agencies will enter a new era of responsiveness and a new era of effectiveness. We're going to consolidate all of these departments and make them accountable to you, the American taxpayer and the American patient.
These goals will honor the aspirations of the vast majority of existing HHS employees who actually yearn to make America healthy. 28 great divisions will become 15. The entire federal workforce is downsizing now, so this will be a painful period for HHS as we downsize from 82,000 full-time employees to around 62,000.
We're keenly focused on paring away excess administrators while increasing the number of scientists and frontline health providers so that we can do a better job for the American people. We're going to streamline our agency and eliminate the redundancies and invite everyone to align behind a simple, bold mission. I want every HHS employee to wake up every morning asking themselves, what can I do to restore American health today? I want to empower everyone in the HHS family to have a sense of purpose and pride and a sense of personal agency and responsibility to this larger goal.
We're going to save taxpayers nearly $2 billion a year, and we're going to return HHS to its original commitment to public health and gold standard science. I want this agency to be once again a revered scientific institution that once made HHS the envy of the world. I want everyone who works here to be proud of this agency, to be proud of the work, to feel a renewed inspiration and their own sense of responsibility for our success in restoring America to good health.
Streamlining HHS is part of a shift to new priorities, especially ending the chronic disease epidemic with clean water, safe food, effective medicine, good science, radical transparency, and a healthy environment. I think most Americans would agree with me that throwing more money at healthcare isn't going to solve the problem, or it would solve it already. Obviously, what we've been doing hasn't worked.
That's why we're making this dramatic overhaul. But the real overhaul is even bigger. The real overhaul is improving the health of the entire nation to make America healthy again.
I am thrilled that RFK Jr is in charge of HHS. I pray that he is successful in changing our sick care system into a true Health Care system that works for all Americans.
When we spend almost 5 TRILLION dollars a year on medical, and we are the sickest country in the industrialized world says we have gone down the wrong path in medicine and it is driven by a food system that is not delivering healthy food to our citizens.
My thoughts for the day.
