Kennedy says he plans to reinstate some personnel and programs severed in massive HHS layoffs

Some personnel and programs affected by sweeping reductions at federal health agencies on Tuesday will be reinstated, including a program at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that monitors lead in kids, US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said Thursday.

CNN reported Wednesday that experts in the CDC’s lead poisoning prevention and surveillance branch who had been helping the city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, address a lead contamination problem in schools were among this week’s layoffs, leaving the city in the lurch.

Asked during an event Thursday about why the lead program had been cut, Kennedy said, “There are some programs that were cut that are being reinstated, and I think that’s one of them.”

Kennedy said that most of the cuts to federal health agencies involved administrative positions that were redundant and that the cuts were meant to streamline the agencies to make them work more efficiently.

However, “there were a number of instances where studies that should not have been cut were cut, and we’ve reinstated them. Personnel that should not have been cut were cut. We’re reinstating them. And that was always the plan,” Kennedy said. “We talked about this from the beginning. We’re going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstalled because we’ll make mistakes.”

Sources at the CDC who spoke to CNN on the condition they not be named for fear of reprisals said members of the lead program had not received notices of reinstatement, however. It’s not clear whether the office would be reinstated at the CDC, with the same people, or whether it would be moved to a different office such as the Administration for a Healthy America, a new agency that Kennedy is forming under the HHS umbrella.

The Milwaukee Department of Health said Thursday that it has also not been notified whether the CDC lead experts would be returning.

“HHS is planning to continue the important work of the lead poisoning prevention and surveillance branch that works to eliminate childhood lead poisoning under the Administration for a Healthy America,” said Andrew Nixon, director of communications at HHS.