Musk and Kennedy have taken a chainsaw to HHS. What does it mean?

Virtually everything HHS is responsible for affects our daily lives.

(U.S. General Services Administration)

By Jeff Nesbit

When Donald Trump told Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a campaign rally just days before the 2024 presidential election that he could “go wild on health” once he’d become his secretary of Health and Human Services, I’m not sure Trump knew just how chaotic and potentially dangerous that would prove to be.

And when you add in Elon Musk’s chainsaw-wielding DOGE cuts at HHS to go along with Kennedy’s effort to remove scientific, medical, and public expertise throughout the ranks of career offices at the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, I doubt Trump has a clue about the destruction he is bringing down on his administration. It’s quite literally a man-made disaster.

Take this one very strange action by the Kennedy-Musk-DOGE team at HHS that Trump and his senior White House staff almost certainly didn’t anticipate—and which Trump might even oppose had someone bothered to tell him about it.

One of the senior medical officials Kennedy removed at FDA was Dr. Peter Stein, who was the career director of the agency’s Office of New Drugs. Kennedy’s HHS cut deep in that office as well (a move that did not sit well with either the biotech or pharmaceutical industries and caused stock prices for many of these companies to drop).

What’s curious about this, however, requires a brief history of this FDA office and what it means to Trump.

In late September 2020, as the Covid-19 pandemic was continuing to kill tens of thousands of older Americans, then-President Donald Trump came down with Covid. Media reports at the time said that it was quite serious—enough so that Trump received an experimental treatment that had just been approved for compassionate use treatment of Covid while awaiting FDA approval.

The medical treatment Trump received—which very likely saved his life—was a monoclonal antibody regimen under development and FDA review from Regeneron, a biotechnology pharmaceutical company. Trump knew Regeneron’s CEO, which is how he’d heard about the emerging Covid treatment.

Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody treatment had recently been approved for personal use (prescribed by a physician) under the FDA’s compassionate-use investigational new drug products process. And the FDA division that approved that compassionate use for monoclonal antibody treatment of Covid-19? The FDA’s office of new drugs (which Kennedy’s HHS just demolished), directed by Stein.

Former FDA Commissioner David Kessler, who was the chief science officer for the Biden administration’s Covid response team, urged Trump Thursday to rescind some of the horrific HHS cuts. He specifically cited Stein’s firing and recounted the story of how Stein—fired by Kennedy and Musk this week—might have saved Trump’s life during the first year of the Covid pandemic.

“I think they’re endangering the lives of all Americans,” Kessler said Wednesday evening on the Rachel Maddow Show. “We are less safe today because of these cuts that have happened over the last several days. I always thought that things were fixable. But I am very concerned that if these cuts are not rescinded, they will have effects for decades.

“I wonder if the president really even knows the extent of what has been done. Remember that night that he was taken by helicopter to Walter Reed? He was having difficulty breathing. He had Covid. He was very sick. He was given two monoclonal antibodies. He referenced those as miracles. They were cures. All of a sudden, he got better.

“I mean – he could have died but for those drugs,” Kessler said. “Dr. Peter Stein’s office ... made available those drugs to the president and to thousands of others. Peter Stein was fired, was let go. I don’t think the president knows that. Someone needs to walk into the Oval Office and say: Mr. President, we just fired the person who may have saved your life.”

Would Trump even care that his HHS secretary and Musk just killed off the FDA office that moved quickly in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic to approve a novel treatment that might have saved his life in 2020? Who knows. But this is just one quite insane example of how wildly irrational the Kennedy-Musk-DOGE cuts at HHS are. There are many, many more examples like this.

For instance, does the Trump White House have any idea what HHS’ Administration for Community Living (which Kennedy and Musk just demolished as well) even does? It runs the wildly popular “Meals on Wheels” program for seniors. ACL funds programs that run senior centers and distribute 216 million meals a year to older and disabled people. This is what Kennedy-Musk-DOGE just set out to destroy.

"The programs that ACL implements improve the lives of literally tens of millions of older adults, people with disabilities and their families and caregivers," Alison Barkoff, who ran ACL in the Biden administration, told NPR. "There's no way to have these (deep personnel cuts) and not impact the programs and the people who rely on them."

And, Kennedy’s HHS laid off every, single staffer from the Division of Energy Assistance. That office runs the wildly successful Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (known as LIHEAP), which helps nearly 6 million low-income households pay heat and cooling bills and pay for home repairs to boost energy efficiency.

The Kennedy-Musk-DOGE cuts at NIH and CDC have been well documented by now. The CDC cuts almost certainly mean we’re now flying blind into a potential bird flu pandemic and ignoring measles outbreaks in the United States. The NIH cuts are a deliberate effort to destroy a world-class biomedical research network that has created dozens of life-saving therapies over the years.

But the deep cuts in senior expertise at FDA—where as many as 3,500 officials could lose their jobs—should worry people every bit as much as the NIH and CDC cuts.

As just one of many examples at FDA, Kennedy and Musk removed the FDA’s chief tobacco regulator, which is a huge victory for tobacco companies. By gutting FDA’s Center for Tobacco Research, they substantially helped the tobacco companies maintain the status quo—which is to continue to sell combusted cigarettes with very little regulation going forward.

The tobacco industry spent tens of millions to try to keep FDA from regulating cigarettes. Once they lost that battle, and the FDA’s tobacco center was created by law, the industry has fought for years to keep the agency from reducing nicotine, the addictive substance in cigarettes, to near-zero levels in combusted cigarettes.

Now, the tobacco industry will continue to sell deadly combusted cigarettes for many more years than it would have otherwise while continuing to talk in vague terms about whether e-cigarettes might someday replace burned cigarettes.

Meanwhile, Kennedy also removed top veterinarians and fired leading veterinarian experts, losing incredible bird flu expertise. He pushed out Dr. Peter Marks, losing critical vaccine expertise from perhaps the nation’s leading vaccine expert in the federal government. And the Kennedy-Musk-DOGE team fired medical officers in charge of new drug approvals, harming pharma and biotech industries and slowing access to life-saving medicines.

“It’s a bloodbath,” one FDA employee told CNN.

“These cuts to agency experts and programs leave our country less safe, less prepared and without the necessary talent and resources to respond to health threats,” said Dr. Mandy Cohen, who was the director of CDC during the Biden administration.

Though it will be weeks or months before these reckless cuts in offices and expertise at HHS are felt by Americans, one thing is clear: Virtually everything of importance that HHS is responsible for that affects our daily lives—whether it’s big social safety net programs like Medicare or Medicaid or lesser-known programs like “Meals on Wheels” for seniors and energy assistance help for low-income homes—is now at risk.

Jeff Nesbit was the public affairs chief for five Cabinet departments of agencies under four presidents.

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