Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now concedes that extensive cuts to his department’s workforce last year should have been more selective.
When HHS last spring announced it would fire 10,000 workers as part of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s efforts to drastically reduce the size of the federal bureaucracy, Kennedy — alongside President Donald Trump — celebrated the cuts as “a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves.”
Days later, he acknowledged that roughly 20% of those employees “should not have been cut.” Kennedy insisted mistakes were “always part of the plan” and a necessary byproduct of conducting sweeping reductions in force.
And in an interview released on Thursday with podcaster Theo Von — who is a friend of Kennedy’s — the secretary said his agency would have been better off issuing “targeted cuts” from the start, amounting to a rare public admission about DOGE from a Cabinet member who, for much of the past year, defended the administration’s approach to reducing its workforce.
“Some of them were very good cuts,” Kennedy told Von, who the secretary said he met years ago “in recovery.”
But not all of them.
“I think we all agree, including Elon, that it would have been better to do targeted cuts — cut the people who were actually causing the problem” and retain “a lot of the new workers who, you know, were only there for a couple of months,” Kennedy told Von, who has conducted long-form, informal conversations with multiple members of the administration as well as with independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont.
Von’s interviews are highly informal. Within two minutes of starting their conversation, Kennedy admitted that he “used to snort cocaine off toilet seats.”
“It might have been better to keep some of those people and change the culture,” Kennedy, 72, said of the mass firings at HHS.
Elon Musk, who spearheaded DOGE, last year gave a muted celebration of the office’s work, saying it was “somewhat successful” in rooting out waste and abuse in government.
Kennedy’s acknowledgement came as the White House cited its cutting of thousands of federal jobs while touting better-than-expected employment numbers this week. But overall, job growth plummeted in 2025, to its weakest level since the pandemic year of 2020.
The sweeping cuts at HHS drew criticism for some of its casualties, including an entire office at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that worked to prevent lead poisoning in children. Those workers were among hundreds of CDC employees reinstated in June.
HHS issued another large round of cuts in the fall, laying off almost 1,000 employees in a Friday-night massacre.
And this week, the agency appears to be undergoing a shake-up at the top: HHS Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill and general counsel Mike Stuart are expected to leave their posts for other government positions amid a broader restructuring plan by the Trump administration, Politico reports.
Will McDuffie is a reporter for MS NOW.