RFK Jr. said HHS layoffs are needed as 'Americans are getting sicker.' Here's what the data shows.
About 10,000 people across the United States Department of Health and Human Services were laid off this week as part of a massive restructuring plan.
In a post on X on Tuesday afternoon, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the layoffs represented "a difficult moment for all of us" but that "we must shift course" because Americans are "getting sicker every year."
An official at the National Institutes of Health with knowledge on the matter, who asked not to be named, told ABC News that the layoffs were an "HHS-wide bloodbath," with entire offices being fired.
Sources told ABC News that affected offices included a majority of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Office on Smoking and Health, key offices in the Center for Tobacco Products, most of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, and the entire assisted reproductive technology team at the CDC.
Then, Kennedy told ABC News on Thursday that some programs would soon be reinstated because they were mistakenly cut.
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In a video statement posted on X prior to the layoffs, Kennedy said that he plans to bring to the agency a "clear sense of mission to radically improve the health of Americans and to improve agency morale."
In the six-minute clip, Kennedy claimed that the U.S. is the "sickest nation in the world," with rates of chronic disease and cancer increasing dramatically and the lifespan of Americans dropping -- though Kennedy did not present any data in his video to support those claims.
Smoking and the use of tobacco products contribute to both chronic disease and cancer -- and the offices tackling those issues are among those that were gutted in Kennedy's recent moves.
While Kennedy is correct in his statement that some chronic disease and cancer rates have risen, public health experts said -- and data shows -- that the country has made great progress tackling illnesses, including driving down cancer mortality rates, and that life expectancy is on the rise.
"Gutting the public health system while claiming to fight disease is a dangerous contradiction," said Dr. John Brownstein, an epidemiologist and chief innovation officer at Boston Children's Hospital, as well as a contributor for ABC News.
"We should be focusing on strengthening – not stripping – the public health system if we're serious about tackling chronic disease," Brownstein continued. "Dismantling key infrastructure will only set us back in the fight to keep Americans healthy."
In a post on X, Dr. Ashish Jha, the White House COVID-19 response coordinator from 2022 to 2023, said Kennedy was incorrect in his statement about Americans getting sicker.
"So much of what is in here is incorrect," he wrote. "Americans are NOT getting sicker every year. After a devastating pandemic, life expectancy is beginning to rise again."
Between 2022 and 2023, age-adjusted death rates decreased for nine of the leading causes of death in the U.S., according to a December 2024 report from the CDC.
This includes decreasing death rates from heart disease, unintentional injuries, stroke, chronic lower respiratory diseases, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes, kidney disease, chronic liver disease and cirrhosis, and COVID-19.
Additionally, age-specific death rates dropped from 2022 to 2023 for all age groups ages 5 and older, the CDC report found.
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The report also found life expectancy in the U.S. is beginning to rise again after it dropped in every U.S. state during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Life expectancy in 2023 hit its highest level since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the CDC report. Data showed life expectancy for the U.S. population was 78.4 years in 2023, an increase of 0.9 years from 2022.
The drop in age-adjusted death rates was largely attributed to decreases in mortality from COVID-19, heart disease, unintentional injuries and diabetes.
"Claims that Americans are getting sicker every year simply don't hold up," Brownstein told ABC News. "Life expectancy is rising again post-pandemic, and we've seen declines in cancer, cardiovascular and overdose mortality."
Kennedy has said he wants to tackle the obesity epidemic, including childhood obesity.
Research does show that obesity is rising in children in the U.S. and is occurring at younger ages, with approximately one in five children and teens in the U.S. having obesity, according to the CDC.
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A 2022 study from Emory University that studied data from 1998 through 2016 found that childhood obesity among kindergarten through fifth-grade students has become more severe, putting more children at risk of health consequences.
However, Jha pointed out in his post on X that "even obesity rates have plateaued and are beginning to turn down" in adults.
For the first time in over a decade, adult obesity rates in the U.S. may be trending downward, with numbers dropping slightly from 46% in 2022 to 45.6% in 2023, according to a study published in JAMA Health Forum in December 2024.
The study reviewed the body mass index, a generally accepted method of estimating obesity, of 16.7 million U.S. adults over a 10-year period. The average BMI rose annually during that period to 30.24, which is considered obese, until it plateaued in 2022, then dropped marginally to 30.21 in 2023.
"Recent research I co-authored in JAMA shows that obesity rates in adults have plateaued and are even starting to trend downward," said Brownstein, a co-author of the study. "That progress reflects the very kind of long-term public health investment this reorg puts at risk."
Kennedy has made tackling chronic diseases a cornerstone of his "Make America Healthy Again" platform.
Over the past two decades, the prevalence of chronic conditions has been steadily increasing, according to a 2024 study conducted by researchers in Iowa, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Texas.
"An increasing proportion of people in America are dealing with multiple chronic conditions; 42% have [two] or more, and 12% have at least [five]," the authors wrote.
However, the study also found that the prevalence of chronic disease varies by geographic location and socioeconomic status. Residents who live in areas with the highest prevalence of chronic disease also face a number of contributing social, economic and environmental barriers, the study found.
A 2022 study from the CDC found chronic diseases linked to cigarette smoking include respiratory and cardiovascular diseases, as well as cancers and diabetes.
Kennedy is correct in stating that cancer rates in the U.S. have increased, with incidence rates rising for 17 cancer types in younger generations, according to a 2024 joint study from the American Cancer Society, Cancer Care Alberta and the University of Calgary.
There has been a notable increase in incidence rates for many cancer types among women and younger adults, research shows.
Incidence rates among women between ages 50 and 64 have surpassed those among men, according to a 2025 report published in the journal of the American Cancer Society.
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Additionally, cancer rates among women under age 50 are 82% higher than among men under age 50, which is up from 51% in 2002, the report found.
However, while cancer incidence has increased, cancer mortality has decreased.
A 2025 report from the American Cancer Society found that age-adjusted cancer death rates have dropped from a peak in 1991 by 34% as of 2022, largely due to reductions in smoking, advances in treatment and early detection for some cancers.
However, there is more work to be done and disparities still persist. For example, Native Americans have the highest cancer death rates of any racial or ethnic group in the U.S.
Additionally, Black Americans have a two-fold higher mortality rate than white Americans for prostate, stomach and uterine corpus cancers, the latter of which is a cancer of the lining of the uterus.
Dr. Jay-Sheree Allen Akambase is a family medicine and preventive medicine physician at the Mayo Clinic and a member of the ABC News Medical Unit.
ABC News' Dr. Niki Iranpour, Cheyenne Haslett and Will McDuffie contributed to this report.
RFK Jr. said HHS layoffs are needed as 'Americans are getting sicker.' Here's what the data shows. originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
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