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The Trump administration could end up rehiring as many as 20 percent of the agency employees it fires as part of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative, according to Department of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“At DOGE, we talked about this from the beginning … we’re going to do 80 percent cuts, but 20 percent of those are going to have to be reinstalled, because we’ll make mistakes,” Kennedy told reporters on Thursday at an event in Virginia, Politico reports.
“If we make mistakes, we’re going to admit it and we’re going to remedy it,” he added.
The comments came as Kennedy’s department moved this week to cut some 10,000 jobs, including drastically cutting the National Institutes of Health, the world’s largest funder of biomedical research, and eliminating thousands of health regulators at the Food and Drug Administration overseeing issues like drug reviews, vaccines, and tobacco.
Among those who may be rehired are regulators from a Centers for Disease Control initiative aimed at monitoring children’s exposure to unsafe levels of lead.
“There were some programs that were cuts that are being reinstated, and I believe that that’s one,” Kennedy said.
The comments mirror those made by DOGE’s de facto leader, Elon Musk, who said in February the effort had “accidentally canceled” the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)’s program to prevent the spread of the deadly ebola virus.
“We will make mistakes,” Musk said. “We won’t be perfect, but when we make mistakes we’ll fix it very quickly … I think we all want Ebola prevention. So we restored the ebola prevention immediately, and there was no interruption.”
Public health experts said such comments are often misleading, given that DOGE cuts often result in hundreds or thousands of employees on the chopping block, hamstringing the normal function of government efforts.
“This is bunk from Elon. They have laid off most of the experts, they’re bankrupting most of the partner [organizations], have withdrawn from WHO [the World Health Organization], and muzzled CDC [Centers for Disease Contro],” Jeremy Konyndyk, who led the federal government’s response to the 2014-2015 West Africa Ebola outbreak as director of USAID’s Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance, wrote on X after Musk’s ebola comments. “What’s left is a fig-leaf effort to cover their asses politically.”
Accidental firings and quick rehirings have been a feature of the DOGE program, which aims to trillions of dollars amounting to most of the U.S. government’s annual discretionary spending.
The cuts were so swift at USAID the administration reportedly fired then rehired a staffer to process time sheets.
Meanwhile, in February, the administration reportedly fired then rescinded the terminations of hundreds of employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, and did the same at the Food and Drug Administration.
In March, in the midst of a legal challenge, the administration was ordered to immediately rehire tens of thousands of probationary federal employees who were terminated from the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, Energy, Agriculture, Interior, and Treasury, among others.
