By Ahmed Aboulenein
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -U.S. health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Wednesday that he has rehired 942 employees who were laid off from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.
Kennedy has vowed to remake the nation’s health agencies, including cutting 10,000 jobs at the Food and Drug Administration, CDC and NIH, but acknowledged on Wednesday that some of those let go were needed.
“I brought 722 people back to CDC, I brought 220 people back to NIH because we were not able to perform our job,” Kennedy told the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health in a hearing on his department’s 2026 budget request.
Wednesday’s hearing is meant to review Kennedy’s health-related spending plans under President Donald Trump’s budget proposal, including an $18 billion cut to NIH funding and $3.6 billion from the CDC.
Kennedy had previously said he planned to cut 2,400 CDC employees and 1,200 at NIH before the partial reversals.
Democrats and other critics have portrayed the cuts as a gutting of the country’s public health infrastructure.
Kennedy said in his opening statement that the staff reductions would save taxpayers $1.8 billion per year and make his Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the other agencies, more efficient.
(Reporting by Ahmed Aboulenein; Additional reporting by Puyaan Singh in Bengaluru; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Bill Berkrot)
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