“This will be a painful period”: RFK Jr. slashes 24% of US health dept.

ERIFNOMI

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Look, without commenting on the substance of these cuts, this is procedurally bonkers! You would ironically need to hire more people and put together committees to review all of these programs and interview various stakeholders before even beginning to plan out the first rounds of cuts. That process should take no less than six months.

It is simply not procedurally possible for RFK Jr or any political appointee from the Trump administration to have done the proper due dilligence required for these cuts to have any useful outcome, and again, this is without getting into the substance of these cuts and rearrangements.

And of course, this really needs congressional oversight as well since each of those agencies was established by congressional statute and those programs (and those positions) involved congressionally appropriated funds.

This is not how HHS is supposed to work.
Hahahaha due diligence?

Good one.
 
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Frodo Douchebaggins

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I pointed out before, my wife is a physician. When doing her residency way back at an inner city hospital, one of the most heart rending things she saw was kids coming in with whooping cough. Nobody hears about whooping cough today. Time for a comeback?

Bruh I got whooping cough in 2010 (definitely from an American, amusingly, but I was living overseas at the time).

Before 2010, I thought it was just an annoying cough with a funny name that sometimes kills babies and the elderly because they're weak. Because I was youngish and healthy I never really went to the doctor so I never got told "hey asshole get your tdap".

Christ on a fucking croissant how I wish I knew then what I learned from getting it.

For those who don't really understand what it's like:

I was not a frail or weak person - I was VERY fit, but I VERY rapidly came to understand how people die from it. I had coughing fits that were so severe and lasted so long I started to lose colour and get tunnel vision because of hypoxia from not being able to get a moment of letting my lungs do… you know… the whole "get oxygen into the blood and to the brain" thing they're evolved to do.

After I was clear of the contagious period and I could go back to work but while I still had the coughing fits, several times I ended up on the floor at work in the foetal position coughing. A few times I had such bad coughing fits that I vomited uncontrollably.

The "whoop" part of the name? It's from the sound your vocal cords make when you cough-exhale most of the respiratory residual volume that is normally still in your lungs when you breathe like a normal healthy person, and then you desperately and uncontrollably inhale to try and get air.

edit: Oh, and wanna know how long it took before these fits stopped completely?

SIX. FUCKING. WEEKS. Oh yes, it was tapering off for a good portion of that time and they were less frequent, but A MONTH AND A HALF of laughing too much or working out too hard could trigger a coughing fit.

Bet your fucking ass I keep up to date on my tdap now.
 
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crmarvin42

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I know grammar isn't his strong point, but shouldn't that be "I want to promise you now that we are going to do more with fewer of you"?
It is worth pointing out that "I want to promise" is not the same things as "I promise". They look very similar, but have spectacularly different actual meanings. One is stating a desire, with no actual promise given. It is worthless as a statement of actual intent. The other is an actual promise.

Also, why is it always "more with less"? Why can't it be "more with what we already have?" I find it impossible to believe, that they can cut 20% of their workforce and actually do even 1% more work. No matter how much red-tape you cut, or efficiencies you find, it is not plausible to expect workers afraid for their jobs to do more when most of their team, or their boss, has been let go for being insufficiently loyal to the POTUS. Particularly in an agency staffed largely with scientists, and the POTUS (as well as the head of HHS) is a fucking drooling moron.

Morale is a fucking thing, and this is the perfect way to tank it for a decade or more. Which is, of course, the actual goal of the cuts.
 
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It is shocking to see how quickly and how willing the current administration is to burn everything to the ground, both inside and outside of the country.

Proper, effective change is usually slow, methodical and split into many discreet steps. This burn everything mentality is just going to leave things in ruin. When it takes decades to rebuild from this fiasco, we all know who the Right are going to blame.
 
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afidel

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You know what? I don't buy that. I'm going to reject that entirely. We're a country of 400 million people on a landmass bigger than all of Europe and we sure as hell act like we're 50 different countries. I think we have exactly the amount of bureaucracy a large complex non-homogenous group of people can be. We have the exact bureaucracy for a country that has long been known as a cultural and ethnic melting pot can be.
minor nit, US population is less than 350M even if you count undocumented immigrants.
 
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phred14

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Almost as painful as getting a brain worm that makes you lose all grasp of reality.
Well that clearly wasn't painful enough. Behavioral psychologists working with worms and such use pain / reward as mechanisms for their learning. Doesn't appear to have worked here, it should have given him a better grasp of reality and the value of proper medical treatment. But you know, Trump's case of Covid didn't teach him anything, either.
 
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SirOmega

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Bullshit. You want to do less with less.

But even if that wasn't a fucking lie, what kind of messaging is that? We're going to do more work with fewer people and fewer funds? So you're saying to those that remain that they're not going to get paid more, but they are going to be doing more work.

Go fuck yourself.
I've been through this.

They want you to "do more with less" by overloading workers which forces them to re-prioritize their workloads and drop "low priority" stuff. The fewer people all working on higher priorities is "more efficient" in their eyes.
 
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phred14

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While there are likely many opportunities for efficiency in any large-scale and distributed operation, it should be done in a contextual and holistic manner so as not to compromise efficacy. Then again, billionaires can be expensive, so it seems the health of the few outweigh the health of the many...
It's not even the "health of the few", because there's nothing healthy about this for anyone. Years back there was even a study showing that reduced wealth inequality made for greater wealth for everyone - even the wealthy. Grubby greed really makes life better for nobody.
 
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Kesh

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I pointed out before, my wife is a physician. When doing her residency way back at an inner city hospital, one of the most heart rending things she saw was kids coming in with whooping cough. Nobody hears about whooping cough today. Time for a comeback?
It's already coming back. Do a Google News search, it's spreading everywhere in the USA.
 
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I'm not expecting better; but his message seems deeply mixed.

If this is "going to be a painful period" that sounds like people who do important things are being fired. However, if the people being fired are "excess administrators" and we "promise you now that we are going to do more with less"; then why will this be a painful period?

Is this just layoff clichés rubbing together? An admission that he's too inept to adjust a system in motion and so will be destroying the current one and leaving everyone to wait for the glorious future?

Honestly, this seems to be a theme for El Presidente's 'reformers': they allege shocking levels of waste and fraud and stuff; but appear completely oblivious to the idea of, y'know, "reforming" an institution by actually understanding how it works; rather than just firing random people and then having to try to find contact information to re-hire the plutonium whisperers that we actually needed come to think of it.

I assume that the answer here is just "dishonesty"; but it seems weird to not even bother massaging the message.
 
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Kennedy and HHS said the cuts will save $1.8 billion each year. That's about 0.027 percent of total federal spending, based on the $6.75 trillion the government spent in 2024, and about 0.06 percent of the $2.8 trillion HHS budget for that year.

Whenever I argue with a pro-Trump person I always use these % metrics and their response is always "half the federal workforce doesn't do anything anyways" :|
 
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Frodo Douchebaggins

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Fortune 500 companies cut jobs, cur positions, even small companies cut jobs all of the time. Why is everyone so shocked when the government does? Jobs still need to be completed, which then falls to either others, it just doesn't get done, goes to contractors, or things need to change maybe because things didn't need that kind of oversight. One of those companies the wife does business with. There was a form that she needed, otherwise they will need to pay taxes. Big company said we won't pay, and since nobody was around to do that any more, she had to do it for them. And they paid for her to do it.

I'm gonna do something sort of out of character for me, and give you the benefit of the doubt that you're posting in good faith.

Yes, maintaining the right headcount and organisational structure is important.

Wildly going in with no fucking understanding of how things work and burning things at random is not how that's done if you want to actually succeed at improving efficiency.
 
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Super King

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No, it just sounds that way when uneducated ignoramuses think their dumb fucking opinion means anything when compared to people who can consistently and reliably differentiate their ass from a hole in the ground.

I'll leave you to speculate on who is being referred to in each role in that sentence.
Too many big words to sound out 😔
 
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42Kodiak42

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While there are likely many opportunities for efficiency in any large-scale and distributed operation, it should be done in a contextual and holistic manner so as not to compromise efficacy. Then again, billionaires can be expensive, so it seems the health of the few outweigh the health of the many...
The irony of it is that the rich will get shafted by this too, less so than the poor, but the loss of coordinated medical resources and medical research isn't good for them by any stretch of the imagination.

Resurgences of infectious diseases means that there are more infectious people around to get them sick, and the workers they exploit rely on will have to take more time off to recover from illness.

Hospital closures and a lack of resources within those hospitals means that when something bad happens to a rich asshole, they have to spend more time in transit to reach a hospital less capable of treating them while they're being triaged against more people.

With the loss of medical research, the cure for Alzheimer's isn't going to just magically appear because Bezos starts suffering from memory loss.

Even the old status quo was suboptimal for the ultra-rich to whom money is no object: The U.S. already had a shortage of doctors bottlenecked by a lack of funding for medical residencies. There are no winners here, only people who lose less than everything.
 
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42Kodiak42

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Yup. And the Biden admin solution? No action.

The best way Democrats can respond to the DOGE stuff is to convince people that they would do the same thing in a better way. Instead, they've chosen to downplay the value of efficiency entirely. Beth exemplifies that well with her "0.027 percent of total federal spending" claims. What's the merit in that exactly? That if federal spending is divided into 1,000 buckets that are each 0.1% of the total there's no longer any point trying to get value for money and the status quo should prevail forever? Okey dokey.
Spoken like someone who doesn't even know what an Inspector General is
 
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mpfaff

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Why do all of these morons just do huge cuts and talk about how it'll be totally better later, even if it's shit now.

Is there too much overhead? Maybe. But the smart way to do it would be breaking it down and looking for the inefficiencies in each area and paring back surgically. If you're having household budget problems you don't stop paying all the bills until you work it out, but that's how Elon Musk and the half-wits in this administration do things. But this is also the administration who thinks Social Security beneficiaries will not really have a problem missing a monthly check, just a pack of rich airheads pretending to be people.
 
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s73v3r

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No, it just sounds that way when uneducated ignoramuses think their dumb fucking opinion means anything when compared to people who can consistently and reliably differentiate their ass from a hole in the ground.

I'll leave you to speculate on who is being referred to in each role in that sentence.
It's that really shitty fucking thing that media companies have latched on to, and that Fox News is exacerbating, which is that accurately reporting on Republicans is seen as "biased" because people thing, "No one could be that terrible!" But yes, they are. Every single one of them.
 
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Barleyman

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I pointed out before, my wife is a physician. When doing her residency way back at an inner city hospital, one of the most heart rending things she saw was kids coming in with whooping cough. Nobody hears about whooping cough today. Time for a comeback?
Eh. I don't think it really ever went away, there's no vaccination program for it as far as I know. In fact I didn't know there's a vaccine for it until I checked right now! I had that bloody 100 day cough last year, where's the damn pertussis vaccine drive by NHS?! The media also said exactly zip about it when it was making rounds!
 
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Qyygle

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Fortune 500 companies cut jobs, cur positions, even small companies cut jobs all of the time. Why is everyone so shocked when the government does? Jobs still need to be completed, which then falls to either others, it just doesn't get done, goes to contractors, or things need to change maybe because things didn't need that kind of oversight. One of those companies the wife does business with. There was a form that she needed, otherwise they will need to pay taxes. Big company said we won't pay, and since nobody was around to do that any more, she had to do it for them. And they paid for her to do it.
That's called outsourcing.
Are you proposing the US outsource public health, to the most expensive, least efficient private health industry in the world?
 
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Anti Jimmy

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I miss the days when Beth Mole was able to focus on terrifying medical conditions rather than terrifying political conditions.
Remember back when brain worms were merely horrifying subjects of Beth Mole articles, instead of making major US health policy decisions? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
 
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