After a tense exchange, Senator Patty Murray (D-WA) told Kennedy that by implementing sweeping cuts to the HHS, he is “enacting his budget,” which “Congress has not passed.”
Senators again got the chance to question Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Tuesday. Despite being presented with evidence to the contrary, he insisted that he didn’t know of clinical studies terminated in conjunction with his sweeping cuts to the HHS budget.
During a hearing before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee, Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) told Kennedy that his cuts had resulted in the firing of ten laboratory heads at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
“They were all PhDs and senior investigators. They are not administrators, whatever that might be,” Durbin said. “If you have your way, they’ll all be gone on June 2nd.” Aside from these layoffs, Kennedy’s cuts have resulted in suspended research grants “involving ALS [amyotrophic lateral sclerosis] and dementia work,” Durbin added.
“I do not know about any cuts to ALS research,” Kennedy said in response. “I just [didn’t] know about them until you told me about them at this moment.”
Things got heated as Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), vice chair of the appropriations committee, grilled Kennedy about staffing cuts at the HHS. “In the last four months, you’ve fired or pushed out nearly 5,000 NIH [National Institutes of Health] staff and terminated more than 16,000 NIH grants, that includes more than 240 clinical trials across the country,” she said.
Sidestepping Murray’s question regarding who authorized these cuts, Kennedy fired back: “Senator, I don’t trust your information.” Kennedy said the Senator had previously provided him with what he alleged was incorrect information regarding a discontinued trial.
After a tense back-and-forth with Kennedy, Murray steered the conversation back to the subject of the HHS budget proposal, “which is asking us to cut dramatically.” Murray claimed that Kennedy was “enacting [his] budget, that Congress has not passed, by cutting critical funding across the board.”
This is the second time Kennedy has appeared before the U.S. Senate in as many weeks. Last week, the Secretary likewise defended the HHS cuts to the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. “This agency has grown so big, so fast,” Kennedy said at the time, noting that his department needed “to do decisive action quickly that could eliminate the metastasizing of this agency, which was growing, growing, growing as our health declined.”
In March, just weeks after his confirmation, Kennedy announced a sweeping reorganization of the HHS, putting some 10,000 jobs on the chopping block and consolidating several units under the department.
