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Miami Herald
20-05-2025
- Health
- Miami Herald
In bustling NYC federal building, HHS offices are eerily quiet
NEW YORK - On a recent visit to Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan, some floors in the mammoth office building bustled with people seeking services or facing legal proceedings at federal agencies such as the Social Security Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In the lobby, dozens of people took photos to celebrate becoming U.S. citizens. At the Department of Homeland Security, a man was led off the elevator in handcuffs. But the area housing the regional office of the Department of Health and Human Services was eerily quiet. In March, HHS announced it would close five of its 10 regional offices as part of a broad restructuring to consolidate the department's work and reduce the number of staff by 20,000, to 62,000. The HHS Region 2 office in New York City, which has served New Jersey, New York, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, was among those getting the ax. Public health experts and advocates say that HHS regional offices, like the one in New York City, form the connective tissue between the federal government and many locally based services. Whether ensuring local social service programs like Head Start get their federal grants, investigating Medicare claims complaints, or facilitating hospital and health system provider enrollment in Medicare and Medicaid programs, regional offices provide a key federal access point for people and organizations. Consolidating regional offices could have serious consequences for the nation's public health system, they warn. "All public health is local," said Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. "When you have relative proximity to the folks you're liaising to, they have a sense of the needs of those communities, and they have a sense of the political issues that are going on in these communities." The other offices slated to close are in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Seattle. Together, the five serve 22 states and a handful of U.S. territories. Services for the shuttered regional offices will be divvied up among the remaining regional offices in Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, and Philadelphia. The elimination of regional HHS offices has already had an outsize impact on Head Start, a long-standing federal program that provides free child care and supportive services to children from many of the nation's poorest families. It is among the examples cited in the lawsuit against the federal government challenging the HHS restructuring brought by New York, 18 other states, and the District of Columbia, which notes that, as a result, "many programs are at imminent risk of being forced to pause or cease operations." The HHS site included a regional Head Start office that was closed and laid off staff last month. The Trump administration had sought to wipe out funding for Head Start, according to a draft budget document that outlines dramatic cuts at HHS, which Congress would need to approve. Recent news reports indicate the administration may be stepping back from this plan; however, other childhood and early-development programs could still be on the chopping block. Bonnie Eggenburg, president of the New Jersey Head Start Association, said her organization has long relied on the HHS regional office to be "our boots on the ground for the federal government." During challenging times, such as the covid-19 pandemic or Hurricanes Sandy and Maria, the regional office helped Head Start programs design services to meet the needs of children and families. "They work with us to make sure we have all the support we can get," she said. In recent weeks, payroll and other operational payments have been delayed, and employees have been asked to justify why they need the money as part of a new " Defend the Spend" initiative instituted by the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency, created by President Donald Trump through an executive order. "Right now, most programs don't have anyone to talk to and are unsure as to whether or not that notice of award is coming through as expected," Eggenburg said. HHS regional office employees who worked on Head Start helped providers fix technical issues, address budget questions, and discuss local issues, like the city's growing population of migrant children, said Susan Stamler, executive director of United Neighborhood Houses. Based in New York City, the organization represents dozens of neighborhood settlement houses - community groups that provide services to local families such as language classes, housing assistance, and early-childhood support, including some Head Start programs. "Today, the real problem is people weren't given a human contact," she said of the regional office closure. "They were given a website." To Stamler, closing the regional Head Start hub without a clear transition plan "demonstrates a lack of respect for the people who are running these programs and services," while leaving families uncertain about their child care and other services. "It's astonishing to think that the federal government might be reexamining this investment that pays off so deeply with families and in their communities," she said. Without regional offices, HHS will be less informed about which health initiatives are needed locally, said Zach Hennessey, chief strategy officer of Public Health Solutions, a nonprofit provider of health services in New York City. "Where it really matters is within HHS itself," he said. "Those are the folks that are now blind - but their decisions will ultimately affect us." Dara Kass, an emergency physician who was the HHS Region 2 director under the Biden administration, described the job as being an ambassador. "The office is really about ensuring that the community members and constituents had access to everything that was available to them from HHS," Kass said. At HHS Region 2, division offices for the Administration for Community Living, the FDA's Office of Inspections and Investigations, and the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration have already closed or are slated to close, along with several other division offices. HHS did not provide an on-the-record response to a request for comment but has maintained that shuttering regional offices will not hurt services. Under the reorganization, many HHS agencies are either being eliminated or folded into other agencies, including the recently created Administration for a Healthy America, under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "We aren't just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic," Kennedy said in a press release announcing the reorganization. Regional office staffers were laid off at the beginning of April. Now there appears to be a skeleton crew shutting down the offices. On a recent day, an Administration for Children and Families worker who answered a visitor's buzz at the entrance estimated that only about 15 people remained. When asked what's next, the employee shrugged. The Trump administration's downsizing effort will also eliminate six of 10 regional outposts of the HHS Office of the General Counsel, a squad of lawyers supporting the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services and other agencies in beneficiary coverage disputes and issues related to provider enrollment and participation in federal programs. Unlike private health insurance companies, Medicare is a federal health program governed by statutes and regulations, said Andrew Tsui, a partner at Arnall Golden Gregory who has co-written about the regional office closings. "When you have the largest federal health insurance program on the planet, to the extent there could be ambiguity or appeals or grievances," Tsui said, "resolving them necessarily requires the expertise of federal lawyers, trained in federal law." Overall, the loss of the regional HHS offices is just one more blow to public health efforts at the state and local levels. State health officials are confronting the "total disorganization of the federal transition" and cuts to key federal partners like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, CMS, and the FDA, said James McDonald, the New York state health commissioner. "What I'm seeing is, right now, it's not clear who our people ought to contact, what information we're supposed to get," he said. "We're just not seeing the same partnership that we so relied on in the past." ____ Healthbeat is a nonprofit newsroom covering public health published byCivic News CompanyandKFF Health News. Sign up for its newslettershere. Copyright (C) 2025, Tribune Content Agency, LLC. Portions copyrighted by the respective providers.
New York Times
20-05-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
The President Will Destroy You Now
One thing stands out amid all the chaos, corruption and disorder: the wanton destructiveness of the Trump presidency. The targets of Trump's assaults include the law, higher education, medical research, ethical standards, America's foreign alliances, free speech, the civil service, religion, the media and much more. J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge appointed by President George H.W. Bush, succinctly described his own view of the Trump presidency, writing by email that there has never before Some of the damage Trump has inflicted can be repaired by future administrations, but repairing relations with American allies, the restoration of lost government expertise and a return to productive research may take years, even with a new and determined president and Congress. Let's look at just one target of the administration's vendetta, medical research. Trump's attacks include cancellation of thousands of grants, cuts in the share of grants going to universities and hospitals; and proposed cuts of 40 percent or more in the budgets of the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Science Foundation. 'This is going to completely kneecap biomedical research in this country,' Jennifer Zeitzer, deputy executive director at the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, told Science Magazine. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, warned that cuts will 'totally destroy the nation's public health infrastructure.' I asked scholars of the presidency to evaluate the scope of Trump's wreckage. 'The gutting of expertise and experience going on right now under the blatantly false pretext of eliminating fraud and waste,' Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, wrote by email, 'is catastrophic and may never be completely repaired.' I asked Wilentz whether Trump was unique with respect to his destructiveness or if there were presidential precedents. Wilentz replied: Another question: Was Trump re-elected to promote an agenda of wreaking havoc, or is he pursuing an elitist right-wing program created by conservative ideologues who saw in Trump's election the opportunity to pursue their goals? Wilentz's reply: I asked Andrew Rudalevige, a political scientist at Bowdoin, how permanent the mayhem Trump has inflicted may prove to be. 'Not to be flip,' Rudalevige replied by email, 'but for children abroad denied food or lifesaving medicine because of arbitrary aid cuts the answer is already distressingly permanent.' From a broader perspective, Rudalevige wrote: I sent the question I posed to Wilentz to other scholars of the presidency. It produced a wide variety of answers. Here is Rudalevige's: Another question: How much is Trump's second term agenda the invention of conservative elites and how much is it a response to the demands of Trump's MAGA supporters? 'Trump is not at all an unwitting victim,' Rudalevige wrote, 'but those around him with wider and more systemic goals have more authority and are better organized in pursuit of those goals than they were in the first term.' In this context, Rudalevige continued, the Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 In the past, when presidential power has expanded, Rudalevige argued, One widely shared view among those I queried is that Trump has severely damaged American's relations with traditional allies everywhere. Mara Rudman, a professor at the University of Virginia's Miller Center, wrote in an email: Trump is not unique in his destructiveness, in Rudman's view, Trump's second term agenda, Rudman argued, is elite-driven: Bruce Cain, a political scientist at Stanford, shares the belief that Trump has taken a wrecking ball to foreign relations. Cain emailed me his assessment: Similarly, Cain continued, Cain argued that in both economics and politics, destruction can have beneficial results, but not in the case of Donald Trump. Musk and Trump, in Cain's view, 'are driven more by instinct than knowledge, vindictiveness than good intentions and impatience than carefully designed plans.' They In ranking the most destructive presidents, the scholars I contacted mentioned both Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan. Geoffrey Kabaservice, vice president for political studies at the Niskanen Center, a center-left libertarian think tank, wrote by email: Paul Rosenzweig, a former deputy assistant secretary for policy in the Department of Homeland Security under George W. Bush and a lecturer in law at George Washington University, was even more pessimistic, writing in an email that he fears that Rosenzweig believes that I asked the experts I contacted whether Trump was laying the groundwork for a more autocratic form of government in the United States. Robert Strong, a professor of political economy at Washington and Lee, replied by email: From a different vantage point, Ellen Fitzgerald, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, questioned the value of trying to determine 'whether Trump is the most corrupt and/or most destructive president in U.S. history.' Such evaluations Despite those cautions, Fitzpatrick acknowledged that 'it's fair to say that if we look at the arc of American history from Reconstruction to the current day, there's no question that Trump is busily destroying much of what several generations of Americans worked very, very hard to achieve.' 'The anti-immigrant sentiment of the late 19th and early twentieth century,' Fitzpatrick wrote, and 'the rhetoric abroad in the land today': Some of those I questioned argued that Trump's assault on American institutions and values is not supported by most of his voters. Russell Riley, professor of ethics and co-chairman of the Miller Center's Presidential Oral History Program, took this view a step farther, noting that Trump explicitly dissociated himself from Project 2025 during the campaign and then, once in office, adopted much of the Project 2025 agenda: Trump, in contrast, 'barely won the popular vote, with just under 50 percent — hardly an electoral mandate, even for an incremental program. Indeed as a candidate Mr. Trump openly distanced himself from Project 2025.' Lacking both a clear mandate and an electorate explicitly supportive of Project 2025, Riley argued, means The reality, however, is that the abdication of power by Republicans in Congress has allowed Trump to create a mandate out of whole cloth. Where will this frightening development take us? The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@
The Independent
27-03-2025
- Health
- The Independent
RFK Jr is axing 10,000 employees at Health Department in dramatic restructuring
Department of Health and Human Services to ax 10,000 employees across several agencies as part of the White House's 'reduction in force' plan to downsize the federal government. The department oversees more than a dozen agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. The layoffs, combined with another 10,000 employees who left voluntarily, will bring the department's total full-time staff from 82,000 down to 62,000 full-time employees, a cut of nearly 25 percent. The department will also close half iof ts regional offices. The restructuring plan will reduce the department's 28 divisions into just 15, the agency said in a statement Thursday. Kennedy, meanwhile, is adding a new Administration for a Healthy America. 'We will eliminate an entire alphabet soup of departments, while preserving their core functions by merging them into a new organization called the Administration for Healthy America or AHA,' Kennedy said on X. 'Over time, bureaucracies like HHS become wasteful and inefficient even when most of their staff are dedicated and competent civil servants,' Kennedy said. 'This overhaul will be a win-win for taxpayers and for those that HHS serves. That's the entire American public, because our goal is to Make America Healthy Again.' Morale was already the 'lowest it's ever been' at public health agencies, and this rapid downsizing could impact the services they provide, warned Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association 'I've done big reorganizations before,' Benjamin told CNN. 'You have to do them very, very carefully, very deliberately. Every time you move the boxes around, every time you downsize or upsize organizations, you make them dysfunctional for some period of time.' Experts say this will impact physicians and other healthcare providers across the country. 'Reductions in the federal workforce may seem more efficient, but it could result in more wasteful spending down the road,' Larry Levitt, executive vice president for health policy at KFF, told CNN. 'New efforts to improve healthy behaviors may work at cross purposes to dramatic reductions in federal programs and big cuts to Medicaid being considered by Congress.' The 'work and expertise of HHS staff are critical to the well-being of our entire population — and to physicians' ability to provide care to patients,' Dr. Stella Dantas, president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, told CNN. 'This attack on public health — and HHS' ability to advance it — will hurt people across the United States every single day,' she said. Democratic Senator Angela Alsobrooks called the cuts 'dangerous and deadly.' "These mass layoffs at Health and Human Services will cost human lives," she said. "I will do all I can to fight this."
Yahoo
11-02-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Federal workers fearful, outraged over ‘DEI watchlist' website
Federal workers across US health agencies say they are nervous and on edge after a conservative group published more than 50 of their names and photos on a website that at one point described them as "targets." The so-called "DEI watchlist," registered in November, triggered alarm among civil servants as it gained traction amid President Donald Trump's efforts to purge the government of positions and programs related to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). The website -- which initially described the workers as "targets" -- now displays "dossiers" for workers it claims have promoted such initiatives, most of whom are Black and women. The group behind it, the nonprofit American Accountability Foundation, says it plans to add another 40 names Tuesday. One federal worker profiled by the site said they were concerned for their safety when a colleague alerted them to the list and its tipline. "First, it was a little bit of fear," the person, who requested anonymity for security reasons, told AFP. "Is my life about to change forever? Then, I think it turned into a bit of anger." Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said he felt "dismayed" to see the website named mostly people of color who are not major policymakers, including friends he said have gone "absolutely silent." "It shocks me, hurts me, makes me afraid for my friends," he told AFP. "They're ruining lives." He said the use of photos was especially troubling and likened it to the harassment faced by Ruby Freeman, a Georgia elections worker falsely accused of fraud in 2020 who later received millions of dollars after filing defamation lawsuits. "People have done this kind of doxxing before, and it puts people at physical risk." 'DEI offenses' Each worker's page contains their name, photo, job title and other publicly available information under the headline: "A quick summary of DEI offenses." Those "offenses" include donating to Democrats and using pronouns online. They also include posting -- or interacting with -- messages supportive of Black Lives Matter or critical of Trump. One person's "dossier" highlights how she liked a LinkedIn post from a connection who contributed to a book on race. Another was singled out for helping people sign up for the Affordable Care Act during an internship roughly a decade ago. A third had updated their Facebook profile picture during the coronavirus pandemic to say: "Stay Home Save Lives." One of the few white people included is listed for a prior role with the Environmental Defense Fund, a nonprofit environmental advocacy group. The federal worker who spoke to AFP said many people featured on the website focus on issues of health equity, such as offering mobile health screenings in low-income neighborhoods. The American Accountability Foundation has previously published lists of workers at other agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, where it identified officials it accused of hindering efforts to secure the border. Last year, the group received a $100,000 grant from the Heritage Foundation, which produced the controversial Project 2025 memo laying out a vision for Trump's administration. Spokesperson Yitz Friedman rejected concerns that the new "DEI watchlist" could endanger workers as a "false premise," saying the fears are "based on a hypothetical." He said his team have themselves received threats since the launch of the website. "We simply reviewed public information," Friedman told AFP, saying the group created the site to "expose" government workers who push "extreme, left-wing, racist ideologies." But the federal worker who spoke to AFP said he heard that some others on the list had pizzas anonymously delivered to their homes last week, an act the person described as "a message to say, 'We know where you live.'" More than a dozen of the workers named appear to have deleted their LinkedIn profiles. One wrote on Instagram that he scrubbed his bio because he was "being harassed." The "DEI watchlist" is now the top result Google returns when searching some of the workers names, an AFP analysis found. The worker told AFP they consulted a lawyer, filed a hate crime complaint with a state attorney general and alerted lawmakers and the NAACP civil rights group. The FBI has also been contacted, they said. "We are even more dedicated now to staying in our jobs and fighting back," the person said, adding that the "DEI watchlist" is "creating our class-action lawsuit for us." bmc/mgs/bgs
CNN
06-02-2025
- Health
- CNN
Public health group alarmed by online ‘DEI Watchlist' targeting federal staff
A public health advocacy group is raising concerns about a 'DEI Watchlist' recently launched by a conservative organization intent on identifying federal workers who might not carry out President Donald Trump's agenda. The list says it's 'exposing the unelected career staff driving radical Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives within the federal government.' It includes 'dossiers' – an earlier version of the site said 'targets' – with names, photos, some salaries and other details on at least 57 federal employees, many of whom work at public health agencies within the US Department of Health and Human Services. Many of the workers named are women and Black people. HHS has not responded to CNN's request for comment. The website, by the American Accountability Foundation, appears to have been online for about a week. The group has put together similar watchlists of federal workers within the Department of Education and the Department of Homeland Security. The organization is one of the groups that has advised Project 2025, a conservative blueprint for reshaping the federal government. Dr. Georges Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, said the new DEI Watchlist 'is done to threaten, to intimidate, to scare.' 'They don't deserve this,' he said of the people on the list. 'I see it as racist.' Tom Jones, president of the American Accountability Foundation, called the idea that the list is a threat is 'nonsense' and said the language was changed from 'targets' to 'dossiers' for 'stylistic' reasons. 'They want to scream that this is a threat because they want to shut down speech they disagree with and make it into something it's not,' he said. Jones said the goal of the DEI Watchlist 'is to help make sure that there are as many eyeballs and resources in identifying folks who are aggressive advocates in this space so the administration can find ways to reassign them and make sure their job isn't promoting this destructive ideology.' The focus of the list was broadened outside of people in diversity offices and positions. Get CNN Health's weekly newsletter Sign up here to get The Results Are In with Dr. Sanjay Gupta every Friday from the CNN Health team. Asked whether people making personnel decisions have reviewed his group's research, he said: 'I have a decent degree of confidence that the right people are reading our work.' Benjamin said he is concerned that these types of attacks may dissuade people from continuing to work on addressing health inequities in underserved communities – work that often has been done through DEI initiatives. 'It dissuades people from wanting to be visible in this space,' he said, adding that he does not view DEI efforts as discriminatory but as a way to ensure that everyone has access to the care, tools, treatment and resources for achieving equitable health outcomes across all communities and demographics. 'They were designed to go to people who are in underserved communities and help them and bring everybody up,' Benjamin said. 'I hope that people will continue to do the work, and I can tell you, we're going to continue to do that work, because this is a matter of life and death.'
