Hirono, Colleagues Demand Answers on Layoffs Bringing Harm to Americans’ Health and Well-Being

~ Layoffs of Tens of Thousands of Federal Workers Will Hurt Seniors, Children, People with Disabilities; Slow Cancer Research and Undercut Public Health Emergency Response ~

WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senator Mazie K. Hirono (D-HI) joined 33 of her Senate colleagues in a letter, led by Senators Mark Warner (D-VA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Chuck Schumer (D-NY), to the Trump administration demanding answers about the tens of thousands of federal health workers that have been fired this week and the unquestionable impact on Americans’ health and well-being.

“Your actions continue to show a reckless disregard for the health and well-being of American families, most significantly for underserved communities. You claim this ‘reduction in force’ will ‘make America healthy again.’ But firings of this scale will do the exact opposite,” the senators wrote. “If you do not reverse course, you will do irreparable damage to our nation’s human services, health care delivery, public health, and scientific infrastructure – making Americans sicker and leaving our communities ill-prepared for future threats.”

The letter to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), comes as HHS begins to dismantle entire agencies, like those focused on the well-being of seniors and people with disabilities and research to promote health care quality, and lay off thousands of workers across the department, including the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the Administration for Children and Families (ACF), and more. Many workers were not informed about their termination until they showed up at work and could not get through security.

“You continue to deny visibility to the American public, despite your oft-repeated commitment to ‘radical transparency.’ You have promised that HHS will do more for the American people, at a lower cost to the taxpayer, yet you have not provided anything to substantiate these claims, despite repeated requests from Congress to do so,” the letter continued.

The letter outlined several keys areas of American health care that will face severe impacts from HHS’s reckless layoffs, including:

• Worsening the harm already inflicted on seniors, people with disabilities, and other vulnerable communities.
• Worsening the harm already inflicted on children, including making it harder to protect children from abuse and neglect.
• Making child care less safe and less affordable.
• Worsening the backlogs in the development of new treatments and cures.
• Weakening access to primary medical care and dismantling the backbone of our current primary care system.
• Leaving communities entirely unprepared to manage ongoing public health concerns and emerging threats.
• Worsening the effects of the opioid epidemic and affecting access to life-saving mental health services.
• Worsening the heightened risks you have created for patient care and safety.
• Cutting off access to in-person assistance by closing regional offices across the country.

In addition to Senators Hirono, Warner, Sanders, and Schumer, the letter was also signed by Senators Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Michael Bennet (D-CO), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Dick Durbin (D-IL), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Chris Coons (D-DE), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), John Hickenlooper (D-CO), Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Tim Kaine (D-VA), Angus King (I-ME), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Edward J. Markey (D-MA), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Jack Reed (D-RI), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Tina Smith (D-MN), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Brian Schatz (D-HI), Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Peter Welch (D-VT), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

The full text of the letter is available here.

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