MW RFK's job cuts at Health and Human Services strike another blow against "MAGA math"

By Brett Arends

Big cuts, small savings

If you're on Team MAGA, do you want the good news or the bad news first?

The good news is that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy is laying off about 25% of all the federal workers who oversee Medicare, Medicaid, the National Institute for Health, the Food & Drug Administration and most other federal health programs.

The bad news? The total savings from these staffing cuts will pay for just 0.5% of President Donald Trump's proposed tax cuts. It will represent less than 0.2% of Elon Musk's promised "$1 trillion" in MAGA savings through the so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

Kennedy on Thursday announced that he was slashing the workforce of the Department of Health and Human Services from 82,000 to 62,000, with 10,000 of those cuts as a result of direct layoffs and the rest from early retirement and other programs. He also said he was putting the department through a massive reorganization, cutting the number of divisions almost in half, from 28 to 15, and closing half the 10 regional offices.

This, he said, "will save taxpayers $1.8 billion."

Total department budget last year? Oh, $1.74 trillion, or about 1,000 times as much.

The paltry savings yet again raise fundamental questions about "MAGA math." HHS is the most expensive single department in the federal government. If Kennedy can save just this from radical surgery on the entire HHS budget, how exactly will Musk find $1 trillion from the entire budget? Has he discovered another 500 HHS budgets to cut?

Most important, where will the money come from to pay for Trump's proposed tax cuts, predicted to cost the U.S. Treasury $450 billion a year?

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an independent and nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based think tank that worries about the national debt - because nobody else does - estimates that making the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent will cost the Treasury $4.5 trillion over 10 years.

It will add another $37 trillion to the national debt over the next 30 years - equivalent to about $280,000 for every U.S. household.

This would lift national debt to about 200% of annual gross domestic product, according to figures from the CRFB and the Congressional Budget Office.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

This, by the way, doesn't even include the additional money needed to fill the holes in the Social Security and Medicare trust funds.

News of Kennedy's deep cuts at HHS have raised inevitable concerns about what these cuts will mean for those who depend on the department - such as all those on Medicare and Medicaid, medical researchers who work with the NIH, those who depend on the FDA for the speedy approval of safe new drugs and others. But only time will tell what the effects will be. It is not correct that cutting staff numbers always, or even usually, leads to worse outcomes. On the contrary, efficiency gains may produce wins across the board. The Medicare Payments Advisory Commission, the independent body of medical experts that advises Congress on Medicare, points out every year that the most cost-efficient hospitals in the U.S. also usually produce better health outcomes than the others.

Team MAGA may be surprised and skeptical to hear that slashing the HHS workforce doesn't save more money. But as Mark Twain supposedly said, it ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble, but what you know for sure that just ain't so. Exhibit A in this regard is the theory, widely believed by Team MAGA and elsewhere, that the entire federal bureaucracy is wildly out of control. As the attached chart shows, this simply isn't borne out by the facts. It is actually the opposite.

Total federal civilian employment today, at three million, is less than it was in 1990. Total civilian federal employment excluding U.S. postal workers, at 2.4 million, is just 5% higher than it was back then.

And that ignores the massive expansion of the overall population, the economy and the entire labor force over that period.

Compare federal employment excluding postal workers with total U.S. private-sector employment over the past 70 years, and you come up with this shocking chart. The first time I ran it, I'll admit that I was surprised at how dramatic it was.

Yes, the number of federal jobs has risen in the past two decades, after bottoming out in the wake of deep cuts during the Clinton administration. There is no doubt room for savings.

But federal employment today, when compared with total private sector employment, is way below the levels seen in the past. And that means, for better or worse, that there is a lot less room for more cuts.

-Brett Arends

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March 28, 2025 08:47 ET (12:47 GMT)

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