Lawmakers question Kennedy on staffing cuts, funding freezes and policy changes at health department

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans and Democrats alike on Wednesday questioned the deep staffing cuts, research funding freezes and drastic policy changes that U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made in a few short months at the helm of the nation’s health department.

Kennedy defended the White House’s requested budget for his agency in back-to-back hearings before the Senate’s health committee and the House’s appropriations committee. The request includes a $500 million boost for Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” initiative to promote nutrition and healthier lifestyles while making deep cuts to infectious disease prevention, medical research, maternal health and low-income heat assistance programs.

Kennedy described his downsizing of the sprawling $1.7 trillion-a-year agency — from 82,000 workers to 62,000 — as necessary cost-cutting measures that have reduced redundancies. He argued that he’s merely consolidating several existing offices that work on women’s health, minority health and sexually transmitted disease prevention.

“When we consolidate them, Democrats say they’re eliminating them,” Kennedy said.

Kennedy revealed on Wednesday that the Trump administration would back down from one major cut: Head Start. Kennedy said he “fought very hard” to restore funding to Head Start in the proposed budget, which provides preschool funding for millions of low-income families across the country.

But Democrats argued other cuts and thousands of job losses will ultimately impact how the federal government works to reduce overdose deaths, provide cancer treatments, or provide heating assistance to poor Americans.

One Washington state mother, Natalie, has faced delays in treatment for stage 4 cancer at the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical Center, said Democratic Sen. Patty Murray. The clinical center is the research-only hospital commonly known as the “House of Hope,” but when Murray asked Kennedy to explain how many jobs have been lost there, he could not answer. The president’s budget proposes a nearly $20 billion slash from the NIH.

“You are here to defend cutting the NIH by half,” Murray said. “Do you genuinely believe that won’t result in more stories like Natalie’s?”

Democrat Bonnie Watson-Coleman of New Jersey asked “why, why, why” Kennedy would lay off nearly all the staff that oversees the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which provides $4.1 billion in heating assistance to needy families. The program is slated to be eliminated from the agency’s budget.

Kennedy said that advocates warned him those cuts “will end up killing people,” but that President Donald Trump believes his energy policy will lower costs. If that doesn’t work, Kennedy said, he would restore funding for the program.