March 28, 2025 02:13 PM UTC

RFK Jr. Dashes Whatever Hopes You May Have Mistakenly Had

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• by: Colorado Pols

As Politico reports, the announcement yesterday of sweeping job cuts at the federal Department of Health and Human Services under new Secretary Robert F. “Leatherface” Kennedy Jr. set off the latest round of panic as the Trump 2.0 administration’s Great Leap Forward bulldozes its way through institutions most of us take for granted…along with not contracting polio or listeria:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s move to gut and reorganize the federal health department shocked many people tasked with making it happen, and left others fearful that everything from the safety of the nation’s drug supply to disease response could be at risk.

The disaster preparedness agency in the Department of Health and Human Services has just two days to prepare a plan to fold itself into the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to an HHS official, granted anonymity for fear of retribution.

Health staffers entrusted with regulating prescription drugs, managing public health programs and conducting scientific research were blindsided by the cuts, with many learning the details from a Wall Street Journal story published early on Thursday, several people familiar with the matter said.

“There’s very few people who actually know what’s happening,” said one health official granted anonymity to describe the internal reaction.

According to Rep. Diana DeGette of Denver via Colorado Public Radio, these cuts are an illegal usurpation of congressional power that if allowed to take effect will, no easy way to say this, kill people:

Colorado Rep. Diana DeGette is calling health cuts by the Trump administration illegal, because they circumvent congressional authority. She said they’ll have a devastating impact on the health of Coloradans and Americans.

The administration announced Thursday a major restructuring of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which includes cuts to 20,000 full-time jobs…

“I’m sure that there are some additional efficiencies to be had, and everybody agrees we need to do oversight to make sure that we’re doing our research as expeditiously and as efficiently as possible. But having one guy that, being Secretary Kennedy, with many views that are not science-based, just be able to go in and say he’s firing 10,000 people and combining a number of the institutes is really shocking, and it’s going to cost lives.” [Pols emphasis]

The large scale of the announced cuts has made early estimates of the full effect difficult, ambiguity exploited by RFK. Jr. who insists that none of these people were doing anything that was actually necessary and that these cuts won’t have any negative effects on the citizen-facing side of the department’s operations. But as the LA Times reports, what that means is now up to a man with questionable ethics and pseudoscientific methods:

“You can’t cut that many people without drastically having to scale back the work that NIH and HHS are doing,” said Nate Brought, who resigned last month from his position as director of NIH’s Executive Secretariat. “It’s just not possible.”

Brought said he worried that research on the LGBT community and AIDS would be completely cut and studies on cancer and childhood disease would falter.

“We’ve already seen them cut back on HIV and AIDS assistance and, to some extent, research, and now I would not be surprised to see most of that go away as well,” he said. “Cancer research I think is a huge one… Anything that touches on any childhood disease being cut is going to obviously be a huge problem. I don’t think Americans are about children dying to meet their political goals.” [Pols emphasis]

The American Federation of Government Employees (AGFE) has already announced its intention to throw this move on the growing pile of court cases challenging the new administration’s massive and in many cases demonstrably reckless cuts to the federal workforce. If Rep. DeGette is right and this is an illegal override of congressional authority, it will fall to the narrow Republican majority in Congress to put their names on a bill enacting these cuts–and that’s a much dicier proposition.

Whatever happens next, if you were still operating on the hope that RFK. Jr. would prove better than the unhygienic, unscientific, possibly rapey crackpot his whole family warned the nation about on the campaign trail last year, it’s time to admit that hope was unrealistic.