(NewsNation) — Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy, Jr. claims that Americans got sicker under the Biden administration, despite the federal agency growing by 38% during Biden’s four years in office.
Now that the agency has slashed 20,000 jobs since President Donald Trump took office in January, Kennedy said it will do a more effective job of tackling chronic illness in America, despite being smaller. HHS officials announced in March that the agency had gone from 82,000 full-time employees to 62,000 and that 28 divisions within the agency would be consolidated into 15.
The restructuring would save $1.8 billion, the agency announced.
“It’s not throwing money at it or hiring people that is solving the problem,” Kennedy told NewsNation on Wednesday, adding. “What we’re doing is streamlining the agency, and we’re recalibrating the trajectory so that people there are narrowly focused on one issue, which is how do we solve the chronic illness epidemic?”
Kennedy said that when his uncle, John F. Kennedy, served as president, only 3% of Americans suffered from chronic illness. He said today, 60% of Americans deal with those types of maladies. Kennedy said the country is spending about $1.6 trillion per year, of 95% of the agency’s budget, on dealing with chronic disease.
Because of those diseases, Kennedy said, 74% of American children cannot qualify to serve in the U.S. military, which is putting a bigger spotlight on the issue his agency is trying to solve.
“So this is an existential threat to our national security, it’s an existential threat to our economy and we have to narrowly focus on that,” Kennedy said, “and that’s what the new HHS is doing.”